Part 3 (1/2)
”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 s.h.i.+p burst into searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed below them. Out toward the velvet dark of s.p.a.ce the side of a waiting s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p and started down again, cutting his rockets as the shadow swallowed them. The s.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p 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.”
Her mouth twisted. ”Afraid to take it?”
He smiled harshly. ”I haven't yet reached the stage where I kill women.
You'll be safe here--the men will find you in the morning. I'm going back, alone.”
”Safe!” she said bitterly. ”For what? No matter what happens, the Project is ruined.”
”Don't worry,” he told her brutally. ”You'll find some other way to make a living.”
Her eyes blazed. ”You think that's all its means to us? Just money and power?” She whispered, ”I hope they kill you, Duke Gray!”