"Got to get you back to the ship. No time to talk. Hurry."
"But you can't walk like that. You're badly hurt. I'll bring help."
"... dangerous. I'll take you."
He'd take her, flirting with death. Because, for all he knew, his time
on Pluto, objectively, had already totalled forty-eight hours. If it
did, he would never live to get off Pluto. Once his thirty days were up,
he would die. Still, there might be danger from other animals between
the scout-ship and _Mozart's Lady_, and he couldn't let the girl go back
alone. It was almost ludicrous, since she had to help him to his feet.
He staggered along with her, knowing he would never make it to _Mozart's
Lady_ and back in time. But if he left her, she was probably doomed too.
He'd sacrifice his life for hers....
They went a hundred yards, Mayhem gripping the blaster and advancing by
sheer effort of will. Then he smiled, and began to laugh. Jane thought
he was hysterical with pain. But he said: "We're a pair of bright ones.
The scout-ship."
Inside, it was very small. They had to lie very close to each other, but
they made it. They reached _Mozart's Lady_.
Mayhem didn't wait to say good-bye. With what strength remained to him,
he almost flung the girl from the scout-ship. The pain in his shoulder
was very bad, but that wasn't what worried him. What worried him was the
roaring in his ears, the vertigo, the mental confusion as his _elan_
drifted, its thirty days up, toward death.
He saw the girl enter _Mozart's Lady_. He blasted off, and when the
space-bound coffin pierced Pluto's heavyside layer, he called the Hub.
The voice answered him as if it were mere miles away, and not halfway
across a galaxy: "Good Lord, man. You had us worried! You have about ten
seconds. Ten seconds more and you would have been dead."
Mayhem was too tired to care. Then he felt a wrenching pain, and all at
once his _elan_ floated, serene, peaceful, in limbo. He had been plucked
from the dying body barely in time, to fight mankind's lone battle
against the stars again, wherever he was needed ... out beyond Pluto.
Forever? It wasn't impossible.