lifeboat n.

The shining life-boat silently parted from the Trenton’s stern and floated gracefully away. They watched it as it slowly gathered headway, moving always on, on, towards where the Sun glowed. [Ibid.] The infinitesimal body lately discovered revolving as another satellite of Venus is the life-boat containing the remains of John R. Winston, who sacrificed himself to rescue the Mercantile (N.Y.) Company’s passenger boat Trenton, last June by pushing her off when she lay stranded on the ‘neutral’ between Mars and the Sun.

I want your thoughts, as well as your knowledge, and I’m going to have them. If you give them voluntarily, I will tinker up a lifeboat that you can navigate back to your own world and let you go; if you resist I intend getting them anyway and you shall not leave this vessel alive.

The human beings were no longer aboard; the little lifeboat that was Skylark Two was no longer in her spherical berth.

They said that spaceships should no more take off without chem supers than they should without lifeboats. The fact that no one within the memory of living man had ever used a lifeboat for anything but joy-riding didn’t faze them.

‘Abandon ship?’ suggested Sheridan. ‘We have to go through the hold to the lifeboat.’

The surcharge of energy delivered in the ruthless attack had reached and crippled his lifeboat. In grim desperation he went into emergency drive. As the lifeboat drifted sluggishly he saw that all firing had ceased and that the Gerex ships were returning across space to their base. The lifeboat spiraled slowly down toward the planet.

Do you think the shuttles and lifeboats will operate, Moorea?

The moment that Galloway, with a last disgusted curse, had stepped into the freighter’s single lifeboat, he, Johnson, had become the captain of this doomed vessel.

No mere lifeboat could possibly sustain a biosphere across years of interstellar flight, so the size of Harmony’s crew had been set by the suspended-animation capacity of its lifeboats.