An idea formed in Kennedy’s mind. “How about letting me out now? We can borrow a jetsled. Everyone’s asleep. At least we can warn the Gannys of what’s happened. You can bring me back here and lock me up again in the morning.”
“It’s too risky. Gunther suspects me as it is,” Engel said.
But Kennedy knew his man. It took him only a few minutes more of persuasion to break down Engel’s resistance. Together they donned spacesuits and headed out to the area where the outpost’s jetsleds were kept. Kennedy was bursting with impatience to see the villagers once again. He realized he had violated a prime rule of the Ganny way by compelling Engel to release him, but this was no time for passive resistance. There was time to put the Ganny philosophy into operation later, when the survival of the Gannys was assured.
“Set the airlock to automatic open-close and let’s get out of here,” Kennedy called to Engel. “We don’t have all night.”
The face behind Engel’s breathing-helmet was stiff and tense. Engel had never entered into any of this with full willingness, Kennedy thought; it was always partly because he thought Kennedy was right, partly because he was being blackmailed into accompanying him.
The airlock started to slide open. Kennedy made room for Engel on the sled and rested his hand lightly on the firing switch.
Floodlights suddenly burst out blindingly all over the airlock area.
Gunther stood there, looking hard and bitter in the bright light. Behind him were three other men—Jaeckel, Palmer, Latimer.
“It had to be you, Engel,” Gunther said slowly. “I figured you were the one that was helping him. That’s why I put you on guard duty tonight. And I guess I was right. What the hell do you think you’re up to on that sled, you two?”
Engel started to say something, something shapeless that was half a moan. Kennedy nudged him viciously with his free elbow.
“Hold on tight!” he whispered. “I’m going to get the sled started!”
“No, you can’t!”
“Want to join me in the brig, then?”
“Okay,” Gunther called. “Get off that sled. This time I’ll make sure neither of you can get loose until that ship leaves for Earth.”
“You make sure of that,” Kennedy said. Calmly he threw the firing switch to full and shoved the thrust-control wide open.
The jetsled bucked and crashed forward in a sudden plunging motion, tossing a spume of yellow flame behind it. Kennedy heard Gunther’s angry yell as the sled passed through the open airlock perhaps fifteen seconds before the time-control was due to close it again.
There was the quick harsh chatter of gunfire coming from behind them. Kennedy did not look back. He crouched down as low as he could on the sled, praying that none of the shots would touch off the fuel tanks behind him, and guided the little flat sled into the Ganymedean darkness.
His course was already figured. He would circle wide to the west, far out enough to mislead any pursuers, he hoped, and then head for the Ganymedean village. But after that, he had no plans.
He had bungled. And perhaps he had cost the Ganymedeans their one chance of salvation, as well as cutting his own throat, by letting Gunther find out what he was doing. He tried to regard the situation fatalistically, as a Ganny might, but could not. It was tragic, no matter how he looked at it, and it could have been avoided had he been more careful.
He forced himself not to think of what would happen to him four days hence, when the supply ship blasted off on its return trip to Earth. No doubt he and Engel would be aboard as prisoners. He had cut loose all bonds with Earth in one sudden frightful moment, and he tried not to think about it.
“I was wondering how long it would take for Gunther to get wise to what we were doing,” he said after they had gone more than five miles with no sign of pursuit. “It was bound to happen eventually. But we had to do what we did, Engel. Someone had to do it. And it just happened that I came along and dragged you into it.”
Engel did not reply. Kennedy wondered about the bitter thoughts the linguist must be thinking. He himself had reexerted the old agency mask; he was not thinking at all, not bothering to consider the inevitably drastic consequences of his wild rebellion pn Ganymede.
They fled on into the night. When he thought it was safe he changed the sled’s course and headed straight for the village. He was becoming an expert at traveling over the icebound plain.
“None of it would have started if you had kept your dictionary hidden away,” Kennedy said. “But you showed it to me, and I borrowed it, and I learned a couple of words of Ganny, and on a slim thread like that you’re washed up with the Corporation and I’m finished with the agency. But you know something, Engel? I’m not sorry at all. Not even if they catch us and take us back to Earth and publicly disembowel us. At least we stood on our hind legs and did something we thought was right.” He stopped to consider something. “You did think it was right, didn’t you? I mean, you didn’t help me in this thing just because I was twisting your arm? I hope you did it out of ethical reasons. It’s lousy enough to throw away your career in a single week, without having done it just because some other guy with ethics came along and made you do it.”
Engel still was silent. His silence began to irritate Kennedy.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Scared speechless? Did the fact that Gunther caught us throw you into such a blue funk you can’t talk?”
Still no answer. A cold worm of panic raced around the interior of Kennedy’s stomach, and he swiveled his neck to see if—
He was right.
One of Gunther’s final desperate shots had ripped a neat hole in Engel’s breathing-helmet. The bullet had entered on a sharp angle, puncturing the helmet just in front of the linguist’s nose, grazing his left cheekbone harmlessly —it left only a thin scratch—and passing out of the helmet below Engel’s left earlobe. That had been enough.
Engel’s air supply must have rushed out in one moist, foaming burst. Blood had dribbled from his mouth and ears as the internal suit-pressure dropped from the 14.7 psi of the suit to the much lower external pressure. Engel’s face was blotchy, purled, swollen, eyes bulging, thin lips drawn back in a contorted, grotesque smile.
He had died in a hurry. So fast that he had not even had time to grunt an anguished last cry into his open suit-microphone. And for half an hour Kennedy had ferried a corpse across the Ganymedean wastes, talked to him and chided him, and finally had lost his patience and his temper at the corpse’s continued obstinate silence.
Kennedy compressed his lips into a thin, bitter scowl. Engel had been so proud of bis dictionary, so anxious to show it off to the visitor from Earth. And a couple of weeks later that dictionary had worked his death, as surely as if it had been the bullet that sent his air-supply wailing out into the desolate night of Ganymede.
At least it had been a quick death, with no time for the man to languish in a prison somewhere and eternally curse the day Kennedy had come to Ganymede.
He stopped by a wide-stretching lake whose “waters” glittered in the light of three whirling moons. Only they and vast Jupiter seemed to be watching as Kennedy gently lifted Engel’s oddly light body from the sled and carried it to where the dark liquid lapped the edge of the ragged shore.
He waded out a foot or two into the lake and laid Engel face-down on the surface of the water. He drifted. Kennedy touched one gauntlet to the dead man’s boot and shoved, imparting enough force to send Engel floating slowly but inexorably out toward the middle of the lake.
To Kennedy’s horror the body remained afloat for some minutes, spinning in a lazy circle as the currents of the lake played games with it. Face down, arms and legs hovering on the crest of the lake, Engel looked like an effigy, a straw dummy put out to drift. But finally the methane came bubbling in through the two holes in his breathing-helmet, and the spacesuit lost its buoyancy and grew heavy, filling with liquid until Engel slowly and gravely vanished beneath the surface.