Part 2

Martin did not say he thought the other two would have shot him, otherwise. He said merely, "At first I wasn't sure myself."

Rodney stood up, backing away from the closed hatch. He held his gun loosely, and his hand shook. "Then prove it. Open it again."

Martin went to the wheel. He noticed Wass was standing behind Rodney and he, too, had drawn his gun.

The hatch rose again at Martin's direction. He stood beside it, outlined in the light of two torches.

For a little while he was alone.

Then--causing a gasp from Wass, a harsh expletive from Rodney--a tenuous, questing alien limb edged through the hatch, curling about Martin, sparkling in ten thousand separate particles in the torchlight, obscuring the dimly seen backdrop of geometrical processions of strange objects.

Martin raised an arm, and the particles swirled in stately, shimmering spirals.

Rodney leaned forward and looked over the edge of the hatch. He said nothing. He eyed the sparkling particles swirling about Martin, and now, himself.

"How deep," Wass said, from his safe distance.

"We'll have to lower a flashlight," Martin answered.

Rodney, all eagerness to be of assistance now, lowered a rope with a torch swinging wildly on the end of it.

The torch came to rest about thirty feet down. It shone on gently rolling mounds of fine, white stuff.

Martin anchored the rope soundly, and paused, half across the lip of the hatch to stare coldly at Wass. "You'd rather monkey with the switches and blow yourself to smithereens?"

Wass sighed and refused to meet Martin's gaze. Martin looked at him disgustedly, and then began to descend the rope, slowly, peering into the infinite, sparkling darkness pressing around him. At the bottom of the rope he sank to his knees in dust, and then was held even. He stamped his feet, and then, as well as he was able, did a standing jump. He sank no farther than his knees.

He sighted a path parallel with the avenue above, toward the nearest edge of the city. "I think we'll be all right," he called out, "as long as we avoid the drifts."

Rodney began the descent. Looking up, Martin saw Wass above Rodney.

"All right, Wass," Martin said quietly, as Rodney released the rope and sank into the dust.

"Not me," the answer came back quickly. "You two fools go your way, I'll go mine."

"Wass!"

There was no answer. The light faded swiftly away from the opening.

The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves.

"Are we going straight?" Rodney asked.

"Of course," Martin growled.

There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination. The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times without number.

Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. "The ship leaves in two hours, Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?"

Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust, his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed.

A grate.

Rodney stared. "Wass!" he shouted. "We've found a way out!"

Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. "I'm at the switchboard now, Martin. I--"

There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate.

The grate groaned upward and stopped.

Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he began to scream.

Martin switched off his radio, sick.

He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall. "Well?"

"I've been trying to get you," Rodney said, frantically. "Why didn't you answer?"

"We couldn't do anything for him."

Rodney's face was white and drawn. "But he did this for us."

"So he did," Martin said, very quietly.

Rodney said nothing.

Then Martin said, "Did you listen until the end?"

Rodney nodded, jerkily. "He pulled three more switches. I couldn't understand it all. But--Martin, dying alone like that in a place like this--!"

Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up toward the surface. "Come on, Rodney. Last lap."

An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force shimmering, almost invisible, about it.

Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship. Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run toward them.

"Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe," someone said. It was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed.