SPILLTHROUGH
By Daniel F. Galouye
[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories ofScience and Fantasy January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Like the sibilant, labored breathing of a dying monster, the torturedship wailed its death sobs as it floundered in deep hyperstellar space.
Clank-sss, clank-sss, went the battered safety valve of the pilecooling system.
BOOM ... boom ... BOOM ... boom. A severed and dangling piston rodcrashed in monotonous rhythm against a deck beam as the rest of theauxiliary compression unit strained to satisfy its function.
An off-beat bass viol strum added its depressive note to the symphony ofdestruction's aftermath—throom-throom ... throom-throom. It was thepersistent expansion of plate metal reacting to heat from a rupturedtube jacket.
Forward, in the control compartment of the cargo craft, the sounds weremuted. But the intervening bulkheads did not lessen their portent.
Brad Conally ran a hand over the stubbles on his cheek and swayedforward in the bucket-type seat, his head falling to rest against thecontrol column.
Somewhere aft the ship groaned and metal scraped against metal with asickening rending sound.
There was a lurch and Brad was jerked to one side, his head rammingagainst the inclination control. The ventral jet came to life inunexpected protest and fired once.
His hand shot out instinctively to return the loose, displaced lever toneutral. But the force of the single burst had already taken effect andthe lower part of his stomach tied itself in a knot.
Centrifugal force reeled him to the fringe of consciousness. Hestruggled to reach the dorsal-ventral firing lever, praying that thelinkage was not severed and the mechanism was still operative. His handfound the lever and jerked. The dorsal jet came to life with a roar. Hejockeyed the control back and forth across neutral position. The twojets fired alternately. The sickening, end-over-end gyration becamegentler.
The ship steadied itself again into immobility. But a snap sounded fromback aft. It was followed by a grating noise that crescendoed andculminated in a terrific crash. His ears popped. A clang reverberated,evidence of an automatic airlock sealing off another punctured sectionof the vessel.
Shrugging fatigue from his body, he looked up at the panel. Themassometer showed a decrease of six tons. The explanation was simple,Brad laughed dryly: A good one-quarter of his load of crated inter-calcaudio retention banks had rammed through the hull and floated intospace.
He glanced at the scope. The twenty odd crates, some of them taking upan orbital relationship with the vessel, were blips on the screen.
Twisting the massometer section selector, he read off the figures. HoldOne showed full cargo of inter-calc equipment. Hold Two, with its thirtybins of hematite, was intact. The third cargo compartment, containingmore crated inter-calc units, was the damaged one. The massometerreading for that hold accounted for the missing weight.
"How're you doing, Brad?" the receiver rasped feebly. He recoiled at theunexpected sound.
"She's still in one piece, Jim," he shouted to compensate for thestrength the signal would lose in traveling the distance to the fleeinglifecraft. "Have y