[Illustration]
_The first ripples of blue fire touched Dio's men. Bolts of it fastened
on gun-butts, and knuckles. Men screamed and fell. Jill cried out as he
tore silver ornaments from her dress._
Mel Gray flung down his hoe with a sudden tigerish fierceness and stood
erect. Tom Ward, working beside him, glanced at Gray's Indianesque
profile, the youth of it hardened by war and the hells of the Eros
prison blocks.
A quick flash of satisfaction crossed Ward's dark eyes. Then he grinned
and said mockingly.
"Hell of a place to spend the rest of your life, ain't it?"
Mel Gray stared with slitted blue eyes down the valley. The huge sun of
Mercury seared his naked body. Sweat channeled the dust on his skin. His
throat ached with thirst. And the bitter landscape mocked him more than
Wade's dark face.
"The rest of my life," he repeated softly. "The rest of my life!"
He was twenty-eight.
Wade spat in the damp black earth. "You ought to be glad--helping the
unfortunate, building a haven for the derelict...."
"Shut up!" Fury rose in Gray, hotter than the boiling springs that ran
from the Sunside to water the valleys. He hated Mercury. He hated John
Moulton and his daughter Jill, who had conceived this plan of building a
new world for the destitute and desperate veterans of the Second
Interplanetary War.
"I've had enough 'unselfish service'," he whispered. "I'm serving myself
from now on."
Escape. That was all he wanted. Escape from these stifling valleys, from
the snarl of the wind in the barren crags that towered higher than
Everest into airless space. Escape from the surveillance of the twenty
guards, the forced companionship of the ninety-nine other
veteran-convicts.
Wade poked at the furrows between the sturdy hybrid tubers. "It ain't
possible, kid. Not even for 'Duke' Gray, the 'light-fingered genius who
held the Interstellar Police at a standstill for five years'." He
laughed. "I read your publicity."
Gray stroked slow, earth-stained fingers over his sleek cap of yellow
hair. "You think so?" he asked softly.
Dio the Martian came down the furrow, his lean, wiry figure silhouetted
against the upper panorama of the valley; the neat rows of vegetables
and the green riot of Venusian wheat, dotted with toiling men and their
friendly guards.
Dio's green, narrowed eyes studied Gray's hard face.
"What's the matter, Gray? Trying to start something?"
"Suppose I were?" asked Gray silkily. Dio was the unofficial leader of
the convict-veterans. There was about his thin body and hatchet face
some of the grim determination that had made the Martians cling to their
dying world and bring life to it again.
"You volunteered, like the rest of us," said the Martian. "Haven't you
the guts to stick it?"
"The hell I volunteered! The IPA sent me. And what's it to you?"
"Only this." Dio's green eyes were slitted and ugly. "You've only been
here a month. The rest of us came nearly a year ago--because we wanted
to. We've worked like slaves, because we wanted to. In three weeks the
crops will be in. The Moulton Project will be self-supporting. Moulton
will get his permanent charter, and we'll be on our way.
"There are ninety-nine of us, Gray, who want the Moulton Project to
succeed. We know that that louse Caron of Mars doesn't want it to, since
pitchblende was discovered. We don't know whether you're working for him
or not, but you're a troublemaker.
"There isn't to be any trouble, Gray. We're not giving the
Interplanetary Prison Authority any excuse to revoke its decision and
give Caron of Mars a free hand here. We'll see to anyone who tries it.
Understand?"
* * * * *
Mel Gray took one slow step forward, but Ward's sharp, "Stow it! A
guard," stopped him. The Martian worked back up the furrow. The guard,
reassured, strolled back up the valley, squinting at the jagged streak
of pale-grey sky that was going black as low clouds formed, only a few
hundred feet above the copper cables that ran from cliff to cliff high
over their heads.
"Another storm," growled Ward. "It gets worse as Mercury enters
perihelion. Lovely world, ain't it?"
"Why did you volunteer?" asked Gray, picking up his hoe.