He looked. Guards and shockers, charged ladders and metal screens. No
weapons, no place to conceal them anyway. He said doggedly:
"But if someone could escape and get word back.... This contraption
is a potential bomb big enough to blow Io out of space! The experts
think it only takes a fraction of a gram of the pure stuff to power a
disintegrator shell."
There was a pulse beating hard under his jaw and his grey-green eyes
were bright.
Loris said, "Escape." He said it as though it were the most infinitely
beautiful word in existence, and as though it burned his mouth.
"Escape," whispered the man with the shimmering, deadly sheathe of
aquamarine. "There is no escape but--this."
* * * * *
MacVickers said, into the silence that followed, "I'm going to try. One
thing or the other, I'm going to try."
Pendleton's incredibly tired eyes looked at the livid burns on
MacVickers' face. "It's been tried. And it's no use."
Birek moved suddenly out of his queer, dazed stillness. He looked up
and made a hoarse sound in his throat. MacVickers caught a flicker
of motion overhead, but he didn't pay attention to it. He went on,
speaking quietly in a flat, level voice.
"There's a war on. We're all in it. Soldiers, civilians, and kings, the
big fellows and the little ones. When I got my master's ticket, they
told me a man's duty wasn't done until his ship was cradled or he was
dead.
"My ship's gone. But I haven't died, yet."
Pendleton's broad, gaunt shoulders drooped. He turned his head away.
Loris' face was a death-mask carved from grey bone. He said, almost
inaudibly:
"Shut up, damn you. Shut up."
The movement was closer overhead, ominously close. The men scattered
across the pit had stopped working, watching MacVickers with
glistening, burning eyes across hot oil-filmed metal.
MacVickers said harshly, "I know what's wrong with you. You were broken
before you came, thinking the smash was coming and it was no use."