Part 2

A foot scraped on stone behind him. He spun on bent knees and flung himself fifty feet to the further side of the narrow gulch with the same movement. Expoder needles splintered the rocks about him as he dropped behind a sheltering rocky ledge, and he caught a glimpse of two green-clad men dragging the bronze-haired body of the girl he had come to save into the shelter of the flyer.

A green bulge showed around the polished fuselage and Rolf pressed his captured weapon's firing button. A roar of pain came from the wounded man, and he saw an outflung arm upon the rocky ground that clenched tightly twice and relaxed to move no more. The outlaw weapon must have been loaded with a drum of poisoned needles, the expoder needles had not blasted a vital spot in the man's body.

The odds were evening, he thought triumphantly. There might be another outlaw somewhere out there in the badlands, but no more than that. The flyer was built to accommodate no more than five passengers and four was the usual number. He shifted his expoder to cover the opposite end of the ship's squatty fuselage.

And something that felt like a mountain smashed into his back. He was crushed downward, breathless, his eyes glimpsing briefly the soiled greenish trousers of his attacker as they locked on either side of his neck, and then blackness engulfed him as a mighty sledge battered endlessly at his skull.

* * * * *

This sledge was hammering relentlessly as Rolf sensed his first glimmer of returning light. There were two sledges, one of them that he identified as the hammering of blood in his throbbing temples, and the other the measured blasting pulse of rocket jets. He opened his eyes slowly to find himself staring at the fine-crusted metal plates of a flyer's deck. His nose was grinding into the oily muck that only undisciplined men would have permitted to accumulate.

Cautiously his head twisted until he could look forward toward the controls. The bound body of Altha Stark faced him, and he saw her lips twist into a brief smile of recognition. She shook her head and frowned as he moved his arm. But Rolf had learned that his limbs were not bound--apparently the outlaws had considered him out of the blasting for the moment.

By degrees Rolf worked his arm down to his belt where his solar torch was hooked. His fingers made careful adjustments within the inset base of the torch, pushing a lever here and adjusting a tension screw there.

The ship bumped gently as it landed and the thrum of rockets ceased. The cabin shifted with the weight of bodies moving from their seats. Rolf heard voices from a distance and the answering triumphant bawling of his two captors. The moment had come. He turned the cap of the solar torch away from his body and freed it.

Heat blasted at his body as the stepped-up output of the torch made the oily floor flame. He lay unmoving while the thick smoke rolled over him.

"Fire!" There was panic in the outlaw's voice. Rolf came to his knees in the blanketing fog and looked forward.

One of the men flung himself out the door, but the other reached for the extinguisher close at hand. His thoughts were on the oily smoke; not on the prisoners, and so the impact of Rolf's horizontally propelled body drove the breath from his lungs before his hand could drop to his belted expoder.

The outlaw was game. His fists slammed back at Rolf, and his knees jolted upward toward the patrolman's vulnerable middle. But Rolf bored in, his own knotted hands pumping, and his trained body weaving instinctively aside from the crippling blows aimed at his body. For a moment they fought, coughing and choking from the thickening pall of smoke, and then the fingers of the outlaw clamped around Rolf's throat and squeezed hard.

The patrolman was weary; the wreck in the upper cavern and the long trek afterward through the dark tunnels had sapped his strength, and now he felt victory slipping from his grasp.

He felt something soft bump against his legs, legs so far below that he could hardly realize that they were his, and then he was falling with the relentless fingers still about his throat. As from a great distant he heard a cry of pain and the blessed air gulped into his raw throat. His eyes cleared.

He saw Altha's bound body and head. Her jaws were clamped upon the arm of the outlaw and even as he fought for more of the reeking smoky air of the cabin he saw the man's clenched fist batter at her face. Rolf swung, all the weight of his stocky body behind the blow, and the outlaw thudded limply against the opposite wall of the little cabin.

No time to ask the girl if she were injured. The patrolman flung himself into the spongy control chair's cushions and sent the ship rocketing skyward. Behind him the thin film of surface oil no longer burned and the conditioning unit was clearing the air.

"Patrolman," the girl's voice was beside him. "We're safe!"

"Everything bongo?" Rolf wanted to know.

"Of course," she smiled crookedly.

"Glad of that." Rolf felt the warmth of her body so close beside him. A sudden strange restlessness came with the near contact.

Altha smiled shyly and winced with pain. "Do you know," she said, "even yet I do not know your name."

Rolf grinned up at her. "Need to?" he asked.

The girl's eyes widened. A responsive spark blazed in them. "Handier than calling you _Shorty_ all the time," she quipped.

Then they were over the Barrier and Rolf saw the last of the beaten Furry Ones racing back across the great wall toward the Plains of Nyd. He nosed the captured ship down toward the ruined plaza of the Forbidden City. Once Mark Tanner was aboard they would blast surfaceward with their thrilling news that all Mars could have water in plenty again.

Rolf snorted. "Shorty," he said disgustedly as they landed, but his arm went out toward the girl's red-haired slimness, and curved around it.