He commented: "Just so. No sudden idea of flight. You . understand?"
"Yes." I smiled.
He watched me as I stood up shakily, stretching my legs until I could walk normally. With the lesser gravity pullit was Mercurian gravity here now1 had to be carefuL Dorrek stood beside me.
"When you hungry, you tell Muta." He laid his huge hand on my shoulder. "Too much bad, so big men like us not real friends."
"Call us that, Dorrek."
"If you real friend, sometime you talk to Rowena. Tell her Dorrek, he great man." I met his steady gaze, and it gave me a shock. There was always a naive earnestness in this burly scoundrel's manner.
I was shocked to realize now it was largely the limitations of his command of English.
"You tell her, 'Dorrek he is great man.' " He said it naively enough, but in his gaze I could not miss a hint of irony in the earnestness of his voice half-real, half-assumed. With a shock came the thought that this fellow was only malong fun of me.
And then I thought that I was mistaken. He added, "You tell Rowenasomeday I kill her and kill you if she find she cannot love me." There was no duplicity in that .speech, I was convinced! He turned and left me without waiting for my answer.
I was free now to move about the vehicle. As Dorrek passed through the interior doorway, one of his men appeared there and stood watching me. I was free to seek out Rowena. But though I longed to do it at once, caution held me. Dorrek might be listening. A surprised, incautious word from Rowena as I told her of my plan for escapeit was too dangerous a chance. I decided to wait, for a time at least. Until the vehicle landed somewhere, we could not even think of a way out.
The Mercurian in the doorway was eying me, but he did not speak. I crossed the room with my hobbled steps and stood at the window.
We were flying at an altitude of a few thousand feet. It was dark, but there was enough light for me to see the landscape beneath. It was changed from the copper uplands of the Light Country to a darker rock, sleek and glistening as though it were largely iron.
The sky was leaden. But as I gazed, with my eyes growing accustomed to it, there seemed a vague green sheen of radiance mingled with 'the clouds. Green, and occasionally dim shafts of a turgid yellow. The window was open with a small sill, breast-high, on which I leaned. A wind was outside; but I guessed it was only the creation of our forward flight. The night was breathlessoppressive. I thought suddenly of what Guy had told us about the black storms.
Was this one of them brewing now? I stood there perhaps an hour, watching the dim landscape slipping past; A dark metallic plain fluted with little rifts and gullies. It seemed steadily rising toward us. As the ball slowly turned on its axis, my view spread to the horizon over all its circle. A close upstanding horizon, black against the sky. The plain was gradually breaking into rougher ccnm"try: deeper gullies, round black pitsunfathomable emptiness downward, and little crater holes, like pockmarks.
For a time it seemed almost a Lunar landscape, as desolate, uninhabited as our frigid Moon. I saw no sign of habitation down here now.
Then, in a little valley, there seemed a huddled group of mound-shaped huts. But the village was doubtless abandoned; there were no lights, nothing moving.
We flew steadily onward. Off to one side, diagonally ahead of us against the horizon, I saw a glow of red-yellow light.
A crater pit, not dead like all the others, but with a fire in its depths. It came into closer view as we passed, a little glowing crater. It seemed almost welcome in the bleak dark desolation. It passed sidewise and went quickly down beneath the rising horizon as we advanced.
I was aware of the air growing constantly colder. And the night darker. Not so much because of the storm; we were advancing, I knew, into the region of perpetual night. The Sunif there had been no clouds to obscure itwould have been always at or beneath the horizon even at the Water City. And here, already it would have set, never to rise.
Presently, I saw mountains coming up aheadblack peaks a great line of them stretching like a wall before us. The ball began rising. The mountains loomed higher, closer.
And then we were over them. I stood amazed, awe-struck.
There is a terror to darknessthings almost, but not quite, visible. Shining Lunar mountains are bleak and desolate, but the light on them brings a grandeur to the beholder, rather than a fear. But here beneath me now was a desolation fearsome in the extreme. Black bottomless canyons, incongruously wide for the sharply convex surface of this small planet; canyons with sheer black walls dropping into blackness; peaks rising like pointed needles; open valleys strewn with crags and boulders.
A ragged, tumbled land, rent and torn by some great cataclysm of nature. Once there may have been fire here; I saw a tremendous upsloping ramp of what might have been congealed lava; a cloven rock peak loomed at its summit.
We were slamming low, and now the mountains were around us. We swung into a deep black canyon. One of its walls, glistening black, slid past my window hardly more than a hundred feet away. Gazing up, I could see its straight edge against the sky and a towering peak still higher. There seemed a white glow upon the peaksome little light catching its mantle of snow.
~ The vehicle turned on its axis. Again I could see ahead up this narrow black canyon and see its floor now, broken and rock-strewn, as we steadily ascended.
The flight of the ball seemed slowing. Ahead I saw where the canyon narrowed to a mere two hundred feet, like the neck of a bottle, beyond which it opened into a wide bowl enclosed by perpendicular, thousand-foot cliffs. We sailed through the neck, out into the open valley. I saw lights.
Dorrek's mountain stronghold lay spread here on the valley floor.
There was a step behind me. I heard a confusion of sound within the vehicle. Tramping feet. Orders. The hiss of the side rocket streamspreparations for landing.
Dorrek appeared. "We are here. You go abovefriend Jack." I followed him to the small ladder incline which led to the upper tier. It was the single connection between. the two floors of the vehicle. He pushed me. A few steps up, I turned to gaze at him. He was smiling.
"You stay up there. I have men stand here so you not come down. Windows have bars up there."
"All right," I said. "Are we landing now?"
"Yes. My camp in the mountains here. We stay three four of your days. Then all of my men are hereMy brues my big weapons. We go attack the Hill Cityl" He took a step upward toward me. "You find Muta up there with the girl Rowena. You send Muta away, you understand? And you tell Rowena, I not so bad man." I saw again that gleam of irony in his eyes. He gestured and turned away, and from nearby three of his fellows appeared.
I ascended. In one of the upper rooms I located Rowena and Muta. I stood unobserved for a moment at its threshold -. my heart beating tumultuously at seeing Rowena again. Am with a thrill, realization swept me: this was the room i] which Roc, Jimmy and I had our conference. In this room hidden in its wall, was the secret compartment containin; weapons! And no one now in the vehicle-save Rowen, and myselfknew that they were herel XII HOPE "NO ONE COMING, ROWENA?"
"NO."
"It must be here somewherea hidden spring, a lever or something. I saw Roc open it. Was it here? You saw him, Rowena."
"Yes, therejust a little higher. I think it was off to the left." Rowena stood at the doorway, watching that no one saw us. I searched with my hands along the steel-paneled wall.
And suddenly was rewarded. What I touched I do not know; some concealed mechanism. The panel slid noiselessly aside.
I had a fleeting thought that Dorrek would have found this tiny arsenal and emptied it. But he had not. The cupboard shelves still held the rows of little bombs and rockets, tiny strange devices, the operation of which I bad no vaguest notion.