"Keep talking, Sheila. Keep me awake."
"... Hilton boomed his discovery. The people were worn out with six years of struggle. They wanted Hiltonism, Peace and Happiness. The passion for escape from life drove them like lunatics."
He found the emergency lever and thrust it down. The last ounce of hoarded power slammed into the rocket tubes. The Falcon reared and staggered.
Then she shot straight for Mercury, with the thin high scream of tortured metal shivering along the cabin walls.
Spaceshells burst. They shook the Falcon, but they were far behind. The ring of red lights was falling away. Acceleration tore at Falken's body, but the web of sleep was loosening. Sheila's voice cried to him, the story of man's slavery.
The naked, hungry peaks of Mercury snarled at Falken. And then the guns of the Spaceguard post woke up.
"Talk, Sheila!" he cried. "Keep talking!"
"So Gantry Hilton made himself a sort of God, regulating the thoughts and emotions of his people. There is no opposition now, except for the Unregenerates, and we have no power. Humanity walks in a placid stupor. It cannot feel dissatisfaction, disloyalty, or the will to grow and change. It cannot fight, even morally.
"Gantry Hilton is a god. His son after him will be a god. And humanity is dying."
There was a strange, almost audible snap in Falken's brain. He felt a quick, terrible stab of hate that startled him because it seemed no part of himself. Then it was gone, and his mind was clear.
He was tired to exhaustion, but he could think, and fight.
Livid, flaming stars leaped and died around him. Racked plates screamed in agony. Falken's lean hands raced across the controls. He knew now what he was going to do.
Down, down, straight into the black, belching mouths of the guns, gambling that his sudden burst of speed would confuse the gunners, that the tiny speck of his ship hurtling bow-on would be hard to see against the star-flecked depths of space.
Falken's lips were white. Sheila's thin hands were a sharp unnoticed pain on his shoulders. Down, down.... The peaks of Mercury almost grazed his hull.
A shell burst searingly, dead ahead. Blinded, dazed, Falken held his ship by sheer instinct. Thundering rockets fought the gravitational pull for a moment. Then he was through, and across.
Across Mercury, in free space, a speeding mote lost against the titanic fires of the Sun.
* * * * *
Falken turned. Paul Avery lay still in his bunk, but his golden eyes were wide, staring at Falken. They dropped to Sheila Moore, who had slipped exhausted to the floor, and came back to Falken—and stared and stared with a queer, stark look that Falken couldn't read.
Falken cut the rockets and locked the controls. Heat was already seeping through the hull. He looked through shaded ports at the vast and swollen Sun.
No man in the history of space travel had ventured so close before. He wondered how long they could stand the heat, and whether the hull could screen off the powerful radiations.
His brain, with all its knowledge of the Unregenerate camps, was safe for a time. Knowing the hopelessness of it, he smiled sardonically, wondering if sheer habit had taken the place of reason.
Then Sheila's bright head made him think of Kitty, and he knew that his tired body had betrayed him. He could never give up.
He went down beside Sheila. He took her hands and said:
"Thank you. Thank you, Sheila Moore."
And then, quite peacefully, he was asleep with his head in her lap.
* * * * *
The heat was a malignant, vampire presence. Eric Falken felt it even before he wakened. He was lying in Avery's bunk, and the sweat that ran from his body made a sticky pool under him.
Sheila lay across from him, eyes closed, raw-gold hair pushed back from her temples. The torn green silk of her dress clung damply. The starved thinness of her gave her a strange beauty, clear and brittle, like sculptured ice.
She'd lived in alleys and cellars, hiding from the Hiltonists, because she wouldn't be Happy. She was strong, that girl. Like an unwanted cat that simply wouldn't die.
Avery sat in the pilot's chair, watching through the shaded port. He swung around as Falken got up. The exhaustion was gone from his square young face, but his eyes were still veiled and strange. Falken couldn't read them, but he sensed fear.
He asked, "How long have I slept?"
Avery shrugged. "The chronometer stopped. A long time, though. Twenty hours, perhaps."
Falken went to the controls. "Better go back now. We'll swing wide of Mercury, and perhaps we can get through." He hoped their constant velocity hadn't carried them too far for their fuel.
Relief surged over Avery's face. "The size of that Sun," he said jerkily. "It's terrifying. I never felt...."
He broke off sharply. Something about his tone brought Sheila's eyes wide open.
Suddenly, the bell of the mass-detector began to ring, a wild insistent jangle.
"Meteor!" cried Falken and leaped for the 'visor screen. Then he froze, staring.
It was no meteor, rushing at them out of the vast blaze of the Sun. It was a planet.
A dark planet, black as the infinity behind it, barren and cruel as starvation, touched in its jagged peaks with subtle, phosphorescent fires.
Paul Avery whispered, "Good Lord! A planet, here? But it's impossible!"
Sheila Moore sprang up.
"No! Remember the old legends about Vulcan, the planet between Mercury and the Sun? Nobody believed in it, because they could never find it. But they could never explain Mercury's crazy orbit, either, except by the gravitational interference of another body."
Avery said, "Surely the Mercurian observatories would have found it?" A pulse began to beat in his strong white throat.
"It's there," snapped Falken impatiently. "And we'll crash it in a minute if we ... Sheila! Sheila Moore!"
The dull glare from the ports caught the proud, bleak lines of his gypsy face, the sudden fire in his blue eyes.
"This is a world, Sheila! It might be a world for us, a world where Unregenerates could live, and wait!"
She gasped and stared at him, and Paul Avery said:
"Look at it, Falken! No one, nothing could live there."
Falken said softly, "Afraid to land and see?"
Yellow eyes burned into his, confused and wild. Then Avery turned jerkily away.
"No. But you can't land, Falken. Look at it."
Falken looked, using a powerful search-beam, probing. Vulcan was smaller even than Mercury. There was no atmosphere. Peaks like splinters of black glass bristled upward, revolving slowly in the Sun's tremendous blaze.
The beam went down into the bottomless dark of the canyons. There was nothing there, but the glassy rock and the dim glints of light through it.
"All the same," said Falken, "I'm going to land." If there was even a tiny chance, he couldn't let it slip.
Unregeneracy was almost dead in the inhabited worlds. Paul Avery was the only recruit in months. And it was dying in the miserable outer strongholds of independence.
Starvation, plague, cold, and darkness. Insecurity and danger, and the awful lost terror of humans torn from earth and light. Unless they could find a place of safety, with warmth and light and dirt to grow food in, where babies could be born and live, Gantry Hilton would soon have the whole Solar System for his