CHAPTER XI

"What is it?" asked Circe. Her lovely face was a trifle pallid. "I feel odd--and you all look pale."

Then it struck Pink. None of the others, even Daley, had recognized what was happening. He did not dare waste a second in telling them. He tore the door open and leaped into the corridor.

Deliberately he tried to draw as much oxygen into his lungs as he could. It was growing rarer every instant; but never mind trying to conserve it--the life of everyone aboard depended on his reaching the atmospheria. For the air in the spaceship was rapidly degenerating, becoming unbreathable as what remained of the good stuff was inhaled and thrown off as useless gases....

Either the atmospheric system had gone on the blink by itself, he thought, which was a hell of a long shot and too much of a coincidence, or else the alien, experimenting, had turned it off by accident.

Maybe the brute didn't need oxygen. Of course he didn't! His brothers outside sure didn't have any. Then, if he were independent of it, but could stand living in it, the probabilities were that he didn't breathe at all; that his metabolism was geared to ignore the elements in which he lived.

Just possibly he was taking this way to kill them off in a particularly fiendish fashion.

Silently Pink cursed the architect who had designed the _Elephant's Child_ with the armaments room in the bow and the atmospheria back near the crew's sector, a thousand feet of passageways off. Every door he flung open took another bit of strength from his aching limbs. As he passed a mirror, he had a glimpse of his face. His face was flushed now, the grim-set lips were bluish, his eyes seemed to bulge from his head.

He began breathing through his mouth. It may have been imagination, but he thought the air had a foul taste, like a sea full of putrid fish.

Pink fell to his knees. Abruptly his strength had waned to almost nothing. He was horrified to realize how swiftly the air was going bad. He had to get to the system! He struggled up, staggered forward like a drunk. His heart, pounding wildly a moment before, now seemed to be slowing, weakening.

He found himself singing....

"_Blast off at two, jet down at three On the dead dry dusty sphere What sort of a life is this for me, A veteran rocketeer?_"

Great God, was he crazy? Singing, shouting the words to that old song that Circe had brought back to his mind. Using up what amounted to his last drops of energy and air. God, God, help me, he thought wildly; make me shut up. But the maddened outer part of his brain kept him singing.

"_I, who have seen the flame-dark seas, Canals like great raw scars, And the claret lakes and the crimson trees In the rich red soil of Mars!_"

Then he fell, and this time he could not get up.

He would lie here and die, horribly, gasping for breath where there was nothing to breathe but death. The mind that had made him sing, that had thought of Circe longingly and of what he must do to save her and all his friends, that blacked out, fell into a pit of ebony walls and ink at the bottom, blackness and nothing left anywhere....

* * * * *

Somewhere deep in his skull, some unknown cranny blazed with the light of knowledge. He had only a few yards to go. He had to make it. This knowledge crept out and through his body, raised cold swollen hands and made them grasp at a wall, forced the feet of this dead man to scrabble for purchase on the floor of the passage. Pinkham knew that he was moving, but it was as if he were sitting on a distant planet and knowing it; there was no realization that this was he, Captain Pinkham, clawing upward and shoving himself on. He looked at himself curiously, rather proud and a little contemptuous. What a fool, what a damn fool, he thought.

Here was a door. The half-blind thing that was Pink groped for the handle, recognizing dimly that if this were not the atmospheria, then it was all over.

He opened the door and fell at full length on the carpet. Instinct rolled him over and hauled him to his knees, and he said admiringly and far away on that planet of death, By God, this is a man! Through a red haze he saw that he was in the first of the two small rooms that made up the atmospheria. He lunged forward, falling, jerked convulsively upward, plunged down a mile and smashed his face into the carpet, felt pain that for a moment brought him out of his stupor. He was making for the master switch that controlled the nitrogen-oxygen-ozone-etcetra that poured continuously through the great ship when all was well. From a great distance he could see that the switch was shoved up; only by breaking a steel band of superb tensility could the alien creature have pushed that switch up, for Pink carried the key to the band on his master ring, hanging at his belt. It looked like viciousness, either of knowledge that this was the humans' finish, or of ignorance flaring into anger. What a _beast_....

He gathered himself like a mortally wounded lion. He launched his perishing frame at the switch, hands clawed to drag it down to the normal position.

He could not feel whether he even touched the wall, for his senses were obliterated. He lay on his face and knew that he would not get up again.

Idly, he wondered whether he had managed to reach the switch.

Then the final flame of intelligence winked out, and it was night and unrelieved blackness, and he fell asleep.