Marcius was about to order them strung end to end and dangled, for the rest of their lives from an over-hanging cliff, when he became aware of his present surroundings with a start. Time to start decelerating.
Sighing, he reached for the proper lever and pulled it back.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the ship seemed to shake itself and Marcius was half lifted from his seat. It couldn't be! The decelerating force should act equally on his body and the ship. How, then, could he be thrown forward?
Something bumped lightly against his helmet and drifted on by. Only for a moment did he stare blankly at the little silvery sphere, then the nose of the ship came away with a weird plopping hiss, and he was jerked through the opening by the force of the escaping air.
In confusion, he tried to swing his body around so that he could see what had happened. He twisted his shoulders around, but his hips turned equally in an opposite direction. To halt one meant to halt the other. He tried kicking his legs back hard, but only succeeded in arching his body and wrenching his back. Desperately, he began kicking and squirming like a mad dancer. Each motion depended upon an equal and opposite motion of his body.
[Illustration: _He began kicking and squirming like a mad dancer._]
In the midst of his struggles, his heel struck on something and started him spinning, head over heels. It was the ship. The combined gravities of the ship and his own body had brought them together again, and he was revolving about the heavier object in a close orbit, and he was turning end for end, now.
Marcius could not feel the motion. It seemed as if the universe were turning about his stationary body, rising at his head and setting at his feet.
He saw the ship then, but it was no longer a ship. It dawned on him why the Plutonians had never ventured much nearer the sun, and why, after they had known all about him, they had let him go.
Receding from him, was a perfect sphere of liquid mercury, once the hard hull of a space ship, covered with a thin layer of water that had once been windows, with small pieces of solid material floating on the surface. It was only a natural law that it should revert to this form when deprived of the sub-temperatures of Pluto.