At that instant the space station shuddered, like a live thing beginning to arouse from sleep, and the floor vibrated a little beneath my feet. Howard had reached the switch of the solar mirrors, and gradually they were pushing out from the underside, pressing the ground, raising the wheel into the air. I wondered how long it would take them to reach their full extent or to break off. I prayed it would be a few minutes at least.... At the first sensation of movement, the titans had frozen, Skagarach in the act of drawing back a fist, Cuff with his hands twined in the long oily hair of the fox-faced Neanderthal. In a split second they were on their feet and leaning over the control panels. "The viewers are dark!" yelled Skagarach. "We've taken off!" I shouted in the same instant. "They couldn't." That was Bill Cuff, jiggling a useless lever furiously. "Unless you ordered them too, you damn--" "I did no such thing!" screeched Skagarach. If the viewers had been on, they would have seen that we were still on the ground. If Howard hadn't started the mirrors out, they'd have discovered my sabotage on the screens. The gamble had thus far panned out. Now I had to make the last try. I shoved open the door at my elbow, dashed into the chamber which held the air blower pump. Yelling wildly, "_What'll we do now?_" _I_ followed Howard's instructions for bringing the blower to full power. Then I leaped into the other room again. They were so demoralized that I might have shot them both in that moment. Something held me from it. I think it was their inhuman strength, the knowledge that these two were the highest product of a race that was not human. Despite the dark blood I knew ran in my body too, I could not feel that I was Neanderthal; and I could not tackle the two toughest Neanderthals at the outset of the private war I had begun. I was--well, I must face it, I was _scared_. As the blower vents started to pour a hurricane of air into the chambers of the great wheel, I leaped past them, flicked on the intercom switch, and bellowed, "Hit the bunks! Lie down and strap yourselves in! _Fast!_" Skagarach had time for one approving look in my direction. "Good Companion!" he said. "You will do!" Then the three of us broke for the next room and the bunks. CHAPTER XI I had no intention of flinging myself onto a bunk. I let them do it, ran into the next chamber and hurled the door closed behind me. My order had carried throughout the station. In each of the rooms, otherwise soundproof, my order to lie down had been heard and followed.