Gray’s fingers had fastened like steel claws on his wrist.
“I get it, now,” said Gray slowly. “That’s why I was sent here. Somebody wanted me to make trouble for Moulton.” His fingers tightened agonizingly, and his voice sank to a slow drawl.
“I don’t like being a pawn in somebody else’s chess game.”
“Okay, okay! It ain’t my fault. Lemme go.” Ward rubbed his bruised wrist. “Sure, somebody--I ain’t sayin’ who--sent you here, knowin’ you’d want to escape. I’m here to help you. You get free, I get paid, the Big Boy gets what he wants. Okay?”
Gray was silent, scowling in the darkness. Then he said.
“All right. I’ll take a chance.”
“Then listen. You tell Moulton you have a complaint. I’ll....”
Light flooded the dark as the door clanged open. Ward leaped like a startled rabbit, but the light speared him, held him. Ward felt a pulse of excitement beat up in him.
The long ominous shadows of the guards raised elongated guns. The barracks stirred and muttered, like a vast aviary waking.
“Ward and Gray,” said one of the guards. “Moulton wants you.”
Gray rose from his bunk with the lithe, delicate grace of a cat. The monotony of sleep and labor was ended. Something had broken. Life was once again a moving thing.
*
John Moulton sat behind the untidy desk. Dio the Martian sat grimly against the wall. There was a guard beside him, watching.
Mel Gray noted all this as he and Ward came in. But his cynical blue eyes went beyond, to a door with a ponderous combination lock. Then they were attracted by something else--the tall, slim figure standing against the black quartz panes of the far wall.
It was the first time he had seen Jill Moulton. She looked the perfect sober apostle of righteousness he’d learned to mock. And then he saw the soft cluster of black curls, the curve of her throat above the dark dress, the red lips that balanced her determined jaw and direct grey eyes.
Moulton spoke, his shaggy head hunched between his shoulders.
“Dio tells me that you, Gray, are not a volunteer.”
“Tattletale,” said Gray. He was gauging the distance to the hangar door, the positions of the guards, the time it would take to spin out the combination. And he knew he couldn’t do it.
“What were you and Ward up to when the guards came?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” said Gray amiably. “He was telling me bedtime stories.” Jill Moulton was lovely, he couldn’t deny that. Lovely, but not soft. She gave him an idea.
Moulton’s jaw clamped. “Cut the comedy, Gray. Are you working for Caron of Mars?”
Caron of Mars, chairman of the board of the Interplanetary Prison Authority. Dio had mentioned him. Gray smiled in understanding. Caron of Mars had sent him, Gray, to Mercury. Caron of Mars was helping him, through Ward, to escape. Caron of Mars wanted Mercury for his own purposes--and he could have it.
“In a manner of speaking, Mr. Moulton,” he said gravely, “Caron of Mars is working for me.”
He caught Ward’s sharp hiss of remonstrance. Then Jill Moulton stepped forward.
“Perhaps he doesn’t understand what he’s doing, Father.” Her eyes met Gray’s. “You want to escape, don’t you?”
Gray studied her, grinning as the slow rose flushed her skin, the corners of her mouth tightening with anger.
“Go on,” he said. “You have a nice voice.”
Her eyes narrowed, but she held her temper.
“You must know what that would mean, Gray. There are thousands of veterans in the prisons now. Their offenses are mostly trivial, but the Prison Authority can’t let them go, because they have no jobs, no homes, no money.
“The valleys here are fertile. There are mines rich in copper and pitchblende. The men have a chance for a home and a job, a part in building a new world. We hope to make Mercury an independent, self-governing member of the League of Worlds.”
“With the Moultons as rulers, of course,” Gray murmured.
“If they want us,” answered Jill, deliberately missing the point. “Do you think you have the right to destroy all we’ve worked for?”
Gray was silent. Rather grimly, she went on.
“Caron of Mars would like to see us defeated. He didn’t care about Mercury before radium was discovered. But now he’d like to turn it into a prison mining community, with convict labor, leasing mine grants to corporations and cleaning up big fortunes for himself and his associates.
“Any trouble here will give him an excuse to say that we’ve failed, that the Project is a menace to the Solar System. If you try to escape, you wreck everything we’ve done. If you don’t tell the truth, you may cost thousands of men their futures.
“Do you understand? Will you cooperate?”
Gray said evenly, “I’m my own keeper, now. My brother will have to take care of himself.”
It was ridiculously easy, she was so earnest, so close to him. He had a brief kaleidoscope of impressions--Ward’s sullen bewilderment, Moulton’s angry roar, Dio’s jerky rise to his feet as the guards grabbed for their guns.
Then he had his hands around her slim, firm throat, her body pressed close to his, serving as a shield against bullets.
“Don’t be rash,” he told them all quietly. “I can break her neck quite easily, if I have to. Ward, unlock that door.”
In utter silence, Ward darted over and began to spin the dial. At last he said, “Okay, c’mon.”
Gray realized that he was sweating. Jill was like warm, rigid marble in his hands. And he had another idea.
“I’m going to take the girl as a hostage,” he announced. “If I get safely away, she’ll be turned loose, her health and virtue still intact. Good night.”
The clang of the heavy door had a comforting sound behind them.
*
The ship was a commercial job, fairly slow but sturdy. Gray strapped Jill Moulton into one of the bucket seats in the control room and then checked the fuel and air gauges. The tanks were full.
“What about you?” he said to Ward. “You can’t go back.”
“Nah. I’ll have to go with you. Warm her up, Duke, while I open the dome.”
He darted out. Gray set the atmosphere motors idling. The dome slid open, showing the flicker of the auroras, where areas of intense heat and cold set up atmospheric tension by rapid fluctuation of adjoining air masses.
Mercury, cutting the vast magnetic field of the Sun in an eccentric orbit, tortured by the daily change from blistering heat to freezing cold in the thin atmosphere, was a powerful generator of electricity.
Ward didn’t come back.
Swearing under his breath, tense for the sound of pursuit in spite of the girl, Gray went to look. Out beyond the hangar, he saw a figure running.
Running hard up into the narrowing cleft of the valley, where natural galleries in the rock of Mercury led to the places where the copper cables were anchored, and farther, into the unexplored mystery of the caves.
Gray scowled, his arrogant Roman profile hard against the flickering aurora. Then he slammed the lock shut.
The ship roared out into the tearing winds of the plain. Gray cut in his rockets and blasted up, into the airless dark among the high