CHAPTER XXIII

Pink bellowed, "Jerry!" He yelled it so loudly that his ears protested at the helmet echoes. Jerry said groggily, "Wha?"

"Stand up!"

Jerry sat up and at once fell flat again. "Judas priest, I can't. That you Pink?"

"We've got to make the ship," he bawled, twisting with pain.

"Make it what?"

"If you want to live, son--stand up!"

Jerry got to his knees. "I'm sick, Pink."

He had used up six seconds. He had to try it on his own. Jerry was too far gone to function properly.

Pink stood up. His teeth were grinding together like millstones, but he didn't stop. He knew pain and dread and rage that shook him. He faced the ship, and stood on his good leg and bent his knee and gave a tremendous hop.

As he fell on his face, an unknown number of yards nearer, a great alien passed him, the mighty sole slamming the rock a few feet from his prone body. Pink struggled upright and balanced on the right leg and made another hop. This time he didn't fall when he lit. Praying thankfully for the two seconds that saved, he sprang again. And fell, painfully.

It was a useless piece of bravado. It was impossible to reach the ship. He got up and leaped. He fell. He forced himself up and sprang and didn't fall and sprang and fell.

He couldn't waste a blink of time in looking at the watch or yelling with agony or even praying now. He went through his routine automatically, his mind a thing of terror. Eons seemed to pass him by as he hopped over the djinn-infested gray rock plain.

A superb spring took him abreast of the big lead vat. What wild scenes of delirium were going on there he could not even imagine. He hopped twice more and was at the ship.

At any instant, at this very second the ship would blossom into red-white carnage of metal and flesh and death. Impossibly Pink stood on his good leg and aimed for the scanner-port which he knew, or hoped, connected with the screen in the control room where Jackson sat.

Now the _Elephant's Child_ was done, Jackson was shoving the switch over, now it would all disintegrate in his face. He flew through space and struck the hull flat; all the perishing strength in him glued his body, his fingers in their thin gloves, to that curving surface. His great helmet, with the crest insignia of comets and spears that marked him as the captain, hung for a short time directly in front of the scanner-port.

He shook his head violently, back and forth, back and forth. _No_, he screamed in his mind, wishing insanely that his radio were constructed so that it could be heard in the ship. _No_, he shook, _no, no_!

Then his precarious grip on the smooth side slid off, and Captain Pinkham fell lightly but finally to the asteroid.

He lay there unresisting. He had done his best, absolutely his damned best. Let it blow. Let it blow.

After a while he looked at his glove watch. It was two minutes past the time for explosion.

He had saved the _Elephant's Child_.

He turned and looked across the plain and saw, beyond the great trap into which giant-smoke was settling, two figures come running toward him with unearthly strides. One of them halted and gathered Jerry into its arms. The other reached Pink and knelt beside him and hugged him tightly. Pink laughed, a passionate sound of relief. Circe said, "You made it, darling. You made it!"

The air-lock began to open.