"Ward gave the game away," said Gray gently. "Too bad."
The face of Caron of Mars never changed expression. But behind those
flesh-hooded eyes was a cunning brain, working at top speed.
"I have a passenger," Gray went on. "Miss Jill Moulton. I'm responsible
for her safety, and I'd hate to have her inconvenienced."
The tip of a pale tongue flicked across Caron's pale lips.
"That is a pity," he said, with the intonation of a preaching minister.
"But I cannot stop the machinery set in motion...."
"And besides," finished Gray acidly, "you think that if Jill Moulton
dies with me, it'll break John Moulton so he won't fight you at all."
His lean hand poised on the switch.
"All right, you putrid flesh-tub. Try and catch us!"
The screen went dead. Gray hunched over the controls. If he could get
past them, lose himself in the glare of the Sun....
He looked aside at the stony-faced girl beside him. She was studying him
contemptuously out of hard gray eyes.
"How," she said slowly, "can you be such a callous swine?"
"Callous?" He controlled the quite unreasonable anger that rose in him.
"Not at all. The war taught me that if I didn't look out for myself, no
one would."
"And yet you must have started out a human being."
He laughed.
The ship burst into searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed
below them. Out toward the velvet dark of space the side of a waiting
ship flashed burning silver.
Even as he watched, the flare of its rockets arced against the
blackness. They had been sighted.
Gray's practised eye gauged the stranger's speed against his own, and he
cursed softly. Abruptly he wheeled the ship and started down again,
cutting his rockets as the shadow swallowed them. The ship was eerily
silent, dropping with a rising scream as the atmosphere touched the
hull.
"What are you going to do?" asked Jill almost too quietly.
He didn't answer. Maneuvering the ship on velocity between those
stupendous pinnacles took all his attention. Caron, at least, couldn't
follow him in the dark without exhaust flares as guides.
They swept across the wind-torn plain, into the mouth of the valley
where Gray had worked, braking hard to a stop under the cables.
"You might have got past them," said Jill.
"One chance in a hundred."