The door was a little way open when the missile struck; it buckled in its grooves and is jammed fast. I can get an arm through. No more. I switch on antigrav and hang there directing the light round the compartment. No rents anywhere, just buckling. This compartment is divided by a partition and the door through that is open. There will be another door into the nose on the other side. I bring back my feet ready to kick off on a dive through that doorway. Behind me, something stirs. * * * * * My muscles go into a spasm like the one that causes a falling dream, my hold tears loose and I go tumbling through the air, rebound from a wall, twist, and manage to hook one foot in the frame of the door I was aiming for. I pull myself down and turn off the antigrav; then I just shake for a bit. The sound was-- This is stupid, with everything torn to pieces in this ship there is no wonder if bits shake loose and drop around-- But it was not a metallic noise, it was a kind of soft dragging, very soft, that ended in a little thump. Like a-- Like a loose piece of plastic dislodged from its angle of rest and slithering down, pull yourself together Lizzie Lee. I look through the door into the other half of this level. Shambles. Smashed machinery every which way, blocking the door, blocking everything. No way through at all. Suddenly I remember the tools. Mr. Yardo loaded the fish-boat with all it would take. I crawl back and return with a fifteen inch expanding beam-lever, and overuse it; the jammed trap door does not slide back in its grooves but flips right out of them, bent double; it flies off into the dark and clangs its way to rest. I am halfway through the opening when I hear the sound again. A soft slithering; a faint defeated thump. I freeze where I am, and then I hear the sigh; a long, long weary sound, almost musical. An air leak somewhere in the hull and wind or waves altering the air pressure below. All the same I do not seem able to come any farther through this door. Light might help; I turn the beam up and play it cautiously around. This is the last compartment, right in the nose; a sawn-off cone-shape. No breaks here, though the hull is buckled to my left and the "floor"--the partition, horizontal when the ship is in the normal operating position, which holds my trap door--is torn up; some large heavy object was welded to a thin surface skin which has ripped away leaving jagged edges and a pattern of girders below. There is no dust here; it has all been sucked out when the ship was open to space; nothing to show the beam except the sliding yellow ellipse where it touches the wall. It glides and turns, spiraling down, deformed every so often where it crosses a projection or a dent, till it halts suddenly on a spoked disk, four feet across and standing nearly eighteen inches out from the wall. The antigrav.