Shari had wakened. She straightened up and looked at Kirby. "Shall we be able to make it?"
"I don't know. Depends on how long it takes the R-3's to locate us. They'll have to hunt, and there's a lot of desert around Kahora. On the other hand, they're fast. A hell of a lot faster than we are."
He looked around apprehensively, but there was no sign of anything yet in the sky, nor did his radarscope show any warning pip. Shari put her hand over on top of his.
"I think perhaps luck will be with us," she said. "You're afraid now, but it is mostly for me. Don't be. Whatever happens, it could not have been any other way."
He took her hand and squeezed it savagely. "I'll see to it nothing does happen. Damn it, this desert always did seem to go on forever. Won't those blasted mountains ever show?"
It seemed to Kirby that the flier barely moved. His heart thumped painfully, and every nerve-end was awake and leaping. He hunched over the controls, trying to urge the small craft forward as one does a horse, with his own body. And then Shari said a surprising thing. She said, "For the first time since I have known, you are happy."
"Happy!" he said. He laughed.
"But you are. I think it's because for the first time you feel free. The net is broken. You may die, but you will not again be a prisoner."
He grunted. "I wouldn't know. Right now I don't feel anything at all but scared."
Ahead of him, out of the gloom, there lifted a jagged wall, not high, because the ceaseless tramping of the centuries had worn away the soil, and then the softer rock, and then the hard rock, grinding them into powdery dust to roll away with the wind, so that only a rag and bone of a mountain chain was left. But it was the thing Kirby was looking for. He shouted suddenly, and on the heels of his exuberance, like a jeering echo, came the first monotonous peet-peet-peet from the radarscope, and a bright little pip showed up at the edge of the screen.
"The mountains are close," said Shari.
"So is the R-3. And look at it come!"
The bright pip moved like a shooting star across the screen. The intensity of the single note increased rapidly. Kirby groaned. The gnawed and ancient peaks were not ahead of him now, but underneath, and the place he wanted to get to was so agonizingly near at hand.
His communicator clamored at him suddenly. It was the port Control Center, where the men with the dials and the indicators and the screens and the infinite numbers of gadgets controlled the R-ships, guiding them, receiving a constant stream of data from them, making the decisions and the final pushings of the ultimate buttons.
"You're centered, Kirby. You have ten seconds before the proximity trip releases the first missile—unless we stop it. You're being given one more chance. Acknowledge!"
The voice began to count down.
Kirby glanced aside at Shari. Then he reached out fast and clicked over the switch. "Kirby acknowledging! This is Kirby—hold your fire!"
"All right." The voice sounded relieved. "Now listen carefully. Here's the deal. We want the starship, and we want it now, right away, fast. We know you're close to it. Lead on, and we'll use that missile on it instead of on you."
"What happens to me afterward?" asked Kirby sullenly.
"You'll be alive. So will the person you have with you. You haven't anything to lose. And you know we'll get the starship anyway."
"Then why make deals with me?"
"We'd rather get it on the ground, before there's even an attempt at taking off. Psychological reasons."
Kirby glared at the passing peaks beneath him, lines drawn deep between his brows. At last he said heavily, "It's in the cleft of the sea bottom, about seventy miles ahead."
"Good. We thought you'd see reason. As soon as the R-3 picks it up visually we'll notify you to turn around and come home."
"All right." Kirby's voice rose to a sharper edge. "I just want you to know that I'm not giving up for myself. I'd just as soon get blown to hell as live like a sheep any longer. But you're right, I've got somebody with me. My wife."
"It all adds up to the same thing. Go ahead, Kirby, but be very careful. That proximity trip is all ready to go the minute anything looks wrong."
"Don't get impatient," Kirby snarled. "I'm right on course. Seventy miles."
"We're patient people. And leave your communicator open."
Kirby turned to Shari. She was leaning toward him, toward the microphone. Her eyes were very bright. Abruptly, in a shrill loud tone that was not like her usual voice at all, she began to upbraid him, calling him a coward, a weakling, an old woman, and going on from there in Low Martian to language he would not have thought she knew. He answered her back, irritably at first and then more and more angrily, until they were shouting at each other and the narrow confines of the cabin rang with it. Faintly from the speaker Kirby could hear the man at Control Center laughing.
Moving as silently as he could he slid out of the seat and opened his secret hiding place and shifted the precious transistors into his pockets. The night beyond the cabin windows showed intensely dark. Shari's voice pealed on, rising to a fish wifely frenzy. He roared back at her, using out of three vocabularies every dirty word he could lay his tongue to, and handed her her rolled-up bundle. Then he reached over and shoved a lever on the panel.
The flier lurched. A volley of deafening explosions broke out and the starboard wing rotor went crazy. Shari screamed, "Do something, you fool, you idiot! We're going to crash!"
Kirby yelled into the microphone, "Hold back your damned robot, I've got to slow down!"
"What's wrong?"
"Are you deaf or something? I've been pushing this crate too hard and she's hot and she's jammed." Kirby fought the controls grinning, the sweat pouring down his face. He nodded to Shari. Under cover of the racket the motor was making she opened the cockpit door, never once pausing in her maniacal shrieks.
"I'm slowing down," Kirby told Control Center. "Don't run over me. Damn you, Shari, shut up!" He brought his palms together with a hard cracking sound. She let out one last yip and was quiet, crouching by the open door, the wind whipping her silken skirt around her legs.
Control Center said, "We're synchronizing speed. Can you clear your motor?"
Kirby worked the lever. The motor choked, roared for a minute into life, and then choked again. There were further explosions. He throttled down some more and made another adjustment. The motor coughed and began to chug along quite normally.
Kirby said, "Yeah. But I'll have to take it easy and let her cool. There's no hurry anyway."
The worn eroded heap of mountain below was gashed with shallow valleys, welling now with darkness. Kirby had lost altitude along with speed. The ridges and plateaus that walled the valleys in were not too far below, not much farther than a man could jump if he wasn't afraid to take a chance.
"Listen, Kirby," said the voice from Control Center grimly, "if that ship takes off before we reach it, the deal's no good. You understand that."
"They won't take off without me, not if they can help it."
"Why are you so important?"
"You don't realize what a rare commodity I am." Kirby was very still now, very tense. His eyes moved sharply from the instrument panel to the black night ahead, and then back again. The flier was going by itself now on autopilot. His right hand was raised, and Shari watched it, crouching by the open door. Kirby said to the microphone, "In this day and age, an experienced spaceman with a master's rating who's still young enough to move without creaking is worth his weight in diamonds to the right people. You bet I'm important."
A dim plateau slid out of the darkness, close underneath. Kirby counted under his breath, and then his upraised hand flashed down. Before the gesture was finished, Shari jumped.
"Is that why you got into this, Kirby? To be important, to be a spaceman again?"
"Oh, hell," said Kirby, "what difference does it make now? All I wind up being is a Judas goat, and inside of an hour the ship will be a pile of junk. Just be content with what you've got and don't worry about motives." He made a dial setting on the autopilot. "Another five minutes and I can increase speed again, if that'll make you any happier."
"Kirby—"
"Oh, shut up. This is bad enough without having to yak about it."
"Okay. If that's the way you want it."
Silence.
Kirby rose and crept to the door and jumped.
He had waited almost too long. The plateau was not wide, and he hit so close to the drop-off that he thought he was going to go over. He lay flat on the rock, jarred to the marrow by the fall, and watched his flier buzzing purposefully away on its course. The small plateau was the last jug of the mountains. Here they fell away into a great deep gulf that had held an inland sea as big as the Caspian, in the days before Mars began to die.
He lay still, watching, and presently above him a shadow passed.
It passed without a sound, not twenty feet over his head, as a shark passes over a swimmer in deep water, unhurried, huge, and potent with a devouring fury. The starlight touched its tapering flanks with a cold pale glimmer and brought to the lensed "eyes" on its forward surface an eerie glint of life. Kirby knew that those eyes were no more than electric cameras, and that they were blinded by the dark. When they needed to "see" the powerful floodlights would click on and give them day, but they were not looking for anything yet. Even so, he shrank closer to the rock, fighting off a horrid conviction that this unnatural child of the guided missile and the pilotless plane was a living thing, sentient, all powerful, and eager to slay.
It passed on, leaving only a whisper of air behind it, following the flier. It pleased Kirby to think of the very small robot innocently betraying its savage cousin. He got up off the rock, calling for Shari, and a man's voice spoke to him out of the darkness.
"Kirby! Kirby, is that you?"
"Yeah." He made out a nervous shadow and went toward it, recognizing it as Hockley, a power-installation technician from a secondary spaceport over on the other side of Mars. Hockley was crouching beside a heap of carefully arranged stones that concealed a field telephone, permanent equipment on this lookout post, and somebody was talking over the phone in a way that verged on the hysterical. But Hockley was paying no attention to it. He was staring after the dark ship.
Kirby took the phone. He spoke into it briefly, giving the exact coordinates of the course being taken by the flier and the R-3, Then he said, "Is everybody accounted for?"
The voice on the other end said, "Now that you're here. You're late."
"Get 'em all strapped in. We're coming down."
"Make it fast."
Kirby put the phone away and shouted again for Shari. She had come up quietly while he talked and was standing beside him, waiting. They started off, the three of them, down the broken, tumbled path that twisted to the foot of the long slope. Both men had made the trip many times before. Sliding and skidding on the steep stretches, raising a trail of fine dust, they went down the drop at a speed that was not quite reckless, alternately helping Shari. On both sides of the path there stretched curious mounds and heaps of stone, a few of them still betraying a rectangular shape. Shari said abruptly, "This was once a city."
Kirby nodded. "It was a port, until the sea dried up and left it." He stopped suddenly, digging his heels in the dust. Out over the sea bottom a tiny nova had burst and died.
"That," said Kirby, "was my flier. Control Center is not so dumb as I had hoped."
Hockley said something between a curse and a prayer. "It'll come back now, looking for us."
A shaft of light, distant but blinding bright, appeared like a pillar upon the desert. It moved. Hockley groaned and flung himself on along the path. Kirby was right on his heels.
They passed the harbor quays, huge broken monoliths worn round and shapeless, still lying dutifully along the edges of a deep gorge that had once been filled with blue water but was now only a naked gash in the rock. There was a way down the cliff, a way like a broad stair. Men had made it, men following the shrinking sea. Fishermen and traders, climbing down to their boats. The mouths of great caverns on both sides of the way, holes gnawed out of the cliff in ages gone by the action of the water. The two men and the woman ran, their feet clattering on the stone. The bright pillar moved swiftly over the sea bottom, light for the R-3's searching eyes.
In the darkness on the floor of the dry harbor there was hurried movement and a sound of voices, and a glinting of the cold stars off colder metal. The mobile-launch interceptor missile they were readying down there was not very much larger than a child's toy, but even in that dim light one would know instantly that it was nothing to play with.
Hockley said, "I wish we had more of those. I wish we had a thousand."
"One ought to be enough."
There was a flash, a hiss, and a nerve-chilling whine that vanished away almost before it was heard. Kirby stopped running, holding tight to Shari's hand. Hockley stopped. They stood motionless. Seconds crawled by like years, and nothing happened. Hockley whispered, "They missed."
"They couldn't. They had the course. Besides, those babies find their own targets, that's what they're built for."
A second nova, vastly larger, flared and fell, and after an interval came the shock-wave and the noise. Kirby laughed.
"Control Center wasn't expecting that. Now we go!"
They half fell the rest of the short way to the bottom. A little group of men received them. The portable rack from which they had launched the missile had already been shoved aside, out of the way. All together they plunged into a vast lopsided opening in the cliff as high as two cathedrals. There were lights in there, carefully shaded so that no gleam reached outside. There were numerous fliers, parked together in a bay of the cavern. Around the walls there were forges and machine tools, collected painfully piece by piece over the years, patched together, cannibalized, improvised and jury-rigged with the utmost ingenuity. There was the litter of much working.
And there was a ship.
Shari uttered a small cry of surprise. "But it's so ugly!"
"What did you expect?" snapped Kirby. "For an ex-tramp freighter—"
She laughed. "I'm sorry. But in your mind its image has been clothed with such beauty!"
They stumbled up the gangplank, crowding the narrow lock that had over its inner door in faded letters, "LUCY B. DAVENPORT, TERRA."
Inside there was pandemonium. Men were shouting. An uproar of women's voices filled all the spaces within the hull, punctuated by the bawlings of children. The outer door of the lock clanged shut. Kirby gave Shari's hand a final squeeze and left her to shift for herself. He too began to shout, running forward along the corridor. Somebody heard him and got hold of the intercom, ordering everyone to shut up and prepare for take-off. Nobody seemed to pay much attention. It still sounded to Kirby like riots going on all over the ship. He clattered up the ladder into the bridge and slammed the door behind him. It was quieter. "Get the hell out of there, Pop," he said to the old man who was sitting in the pilot's chair.
Pop Barstow grinned at him. "I was hoping you wouldn't show up, so's I could take the old Ark off myself." He slid into the co-pilot's place and laid the webbing over his lank middle.
Kirby said grimly, "You may get your chance yet. Give 'em the siren."
He punched the firing keys. A great roaring filled the cavern and the deck beneath him leaped. The siren began to wail. The ship's bow-light came on, outlining the cavern's mouth in a hard white brilliance. Sitting stiff and quivering in the pilot's chair, Kirby began to nurse the Lucy B. Davenport forward along the launchway that had been prepared for her. It had been a long time since he held a ship under his hands. Too long. He was scared. Maybe he couldn't do it anymore. Maybe he'd crash her, with all those screaming women and kids. With Shari.
"Butterflies?" asked Barstow.
Kirby shook his head. "Buzzards."
"You're too young, Kirby. Let me have her."
Kirby laughed. They were clear of the cavern now—almost. A little bit farther. His insides felt as though they were caught in a vise. They hurt.
Shaw, the radar man, said suddenly, "I'm picking up something." From the back of the bridgeroom where he bent over the 'scope there came the monotonous, nerve-clawing bleat of the signal, still faint but growing louder.
"More R-3's," said Barstow. "Well, young Kirby, are you going to let 'em catch us?"
They were clear of the cavern. Kirby shut his jaws together and leaned forward over the control bank. The belly jets cut in with a howl and a burst of flame. The ship rose up enormously as though on a column of fire, and the stern jets opened wide to full power. The Lucy B. Davenport pointed her nose to the black sky and went up screaming, leaving behind her a roll of apocalyptic thunder. Almost before Kirby knew it they were in silence and open space, and the radarscope was blank.
Pop Barstow reached solemnly inside his shirt and came out with a bottle. He drank and passed it to Kirby, who needed it.
"Well," said Barstow, "so far, so good. We made it."
Kirby gasped and ran his hand over his mouth, passing the bottle back. He looked out through the bow port. The landing light was off, and there was space, where he had lived once until he was prisoned on a planet. It had not changed. The stars burned just as bright, and the gulfs between them were as deep and dark and cold. He shivered, a shallow twitching of the skin. He was a stranger here now, an intruder. Space no longer belonged to a man. It was the kingdom of the dark ships, of which the R-3's had been only the small foretaste.
At her present desperate rate of acceleration, the Lucy B. Davenport would be clear of the System and beyond the range of the interplanetary control stations before even the Mars-based ships could catch her. They had timed their takeoff very carefully for that. From then on there was nothing between them and their destination but space—4.3 light-years of it.
But even in the immensity of interstellar space, there was no safety. Here, too, the dark ships had outstripped man. And it was only a question of time.
"Yeah," said Kirby heavily, "we made it. Now all we have to do is wait, and wonder every second if the R-ships can run us down."