the next hurdle—and ever-ready to take it himself if I was ready to cop out. I’d learned from him, he from me. We were running the race together now.
It didn’t help the decision, but if he’d offered advice it wouldn’t have helped either. It would have sidetracked the whole issue. This way, I was still poised. Devil or deep blue sea?
“It pays to stay alive,” said Sam.
“I’m not going to let Soulier have his way,” I said. “Of all things, that’s the top priority. I can’t fight Caradoc, but I’m damned if I’ll let them crush me. I’ll go to hell first, let alone the backwoods. They made me an offer I can’t refuse.”
“That’s the worst kind,” agreed Sam.
“So bugger ’em. I’ll cheat the bastards if it kills me.”
Trouble was, it might.
My stomach had never recovered from the sinking it took when I first found the man from Caradoc standing at my shoulder, and the gut-blow it took from the heavy hadn’t helped any. If it wasn’t for the wind I could have had a hellish case of indigestion. In spite of the wind, I felt one coming on.
Then the call circuit beeped. It sounded like I felt.
I automatically reached out to answer it, but Sam was up off his couch knocking my hand away. “I’m O.O.W.,” he muttered. “Want to get me shot?”
He acknowledged the call, and I heard the captain’s voice interrupt him, in a cold, syrupy tone.
“You get that drive-unit into shape,” he said. “Wake Grainger. I’ve got the others here and I’m bringing them in. Plus a couple of passengers. We’ve been chartered and we’re taking off tonight. As soon as humanly possible. These guys have pressing business.”
“We can’t,” Sam protested. “Half the cargo is still underneath our fins. They knocked off shifting it when their time ran out. Where you going to find a gang at this time of night? Or is the kid going to do it all himself?”
“The gang is on its way out right now,” said the captain. “The area will be clear in ninety minutes. We’ve been cleared for takeoff already. We lift at oh-oh-six ship-standard. Move it.”
“Yes, Captain Haeckel, sir,” said Sam, with more than a hint of insubordination, “you’re the boss.”
He switched off the circuit, and he turned his pale eyes on me.
“They found out you’re not in the hospital,” he said. “You just ran right out of time. If you’re going to run, you better start right now. They’ll be covering the port, but there are ways of getting through the perimeter....”
My legs were itching. For all I knew they might be underneath the fins right now, with a butterfly net, just waiting. I looked at the screen, and I saw half a dozen tiny figures ambling across the tarpol. The jumbo crew. No Haeckel, no passengers.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” said Sam.
“What the hell for?”
He was already on his way out of the door, running for his cabin.
“I’ll show you the way through the perimeter,” he called back.
“Man,” I said, “I know how to skip a field. I’m not an idiot.”
But he’d gone. He was coming. I knew he was a fool, and that it wouldn’t do him or me the slightest bit of good. I knew that he didn’t and shouldn’t owe me anything, and that he was riding the tide of some ridiculous impulse. But I didn’t have the heart to stop him. I didn’t want to stop him.
“Thanks, Sam.” I said, as I moved to the door myself. He couldn’t hear me. I was talking to myself.
CHAPTER FOUR
I grabbed my packsack, which contained virtually nothing except some clothes and some junk (eyeshades, a few tools, a miniature medical kit), and I didn’t pause to say good-bye to my ship. Sam spent a couple of minutes rummaging in his bunk locker and in his engine room, filling up his pockets with anything that looked potentially useful. Then we slipped out of the belly of the ship into the shadow of the fins. The cargo, unevenly distributed over an area of thirty or forty square yards, gave us some cover while we dodged away from the ship and barrelled across the field.
The gang of laborers who were trucking out toward us didn’t see us, and we didn’t see anyone else skulking in the shadows. Soulier shouldn’t have let Haeckel call the ship. It was a mistake—I thought. We made it through the perimeter fence and into the bush without the slightest suspicion of trouble. We pat clear of the environs in a matter of minutes.
We were out of breath, but we didn’t stop. We pushed ourselves on into the darkness.
At first we were traveling across land where human feet had undoubtedly trod—and trod often. Several times we skirted fields where the locals were trying to persuade things to grow or rear meat animals. The only thing which attempted to get in our way at any time was a cow. It must have sensed that I didn’t like cows, because it thought better of it when we came too close.
Eventually, however, we got out into some real wild country—moor and scrub. When dawn came we were dog tired, and making very little progress across the countryside. When gray daylight came the wind seemed sharper and the air seemed colder. It was crystal clear.
There wasn’t a hint of mist close to the ground or cloud up in the sky. The big red sun was a long time dragging himself up over the horizon, and even when he was pushing on clear into the sky it didn’t seem to get any warmer.
We’d stopped running, but we kept on making what pace we could. Sam moved with surprising ease and tirelessness—I think he was trading on a certain excitement and the sheer hell of it. It was largely desperation that kept my feet going.
We didn’t pause until we hit the road. Sam was pleased when we did and he reckoned we ought to follow it. At least we’d know we were going somewhere, and we shouldn’t find it too difficult to make ourselves unobtrusive if someone happened along that we’d rather not meet.
I trusted his judgment, and it made walking a little easier.
We ended up sometime after noon in a vast complex of fields which were in the process of being marked out for management on a grand scale. Some of the land was cleared, some of it was already under cultivation, but there were signs that this was quite an old plan which had somehow failed to get off the ground completely. It suggested optimism rather than determination. There was equipment lying around on the edges of fields which nature was in the process of reinvading, and it was both old and dilapidated. A big bulldozer sat on the crest of a ridge nearly half a mile away, looking functional enough, but this was someone’s unrealized dream, not the lifeblood of a world. From the crest of that same rise, when we reached it, we could see the whole scope of the project and get the feel of its hollowness. The land was dotted with long, low buts and barns that looked like slices cut off a railway tunnel, semicircular in section. In one of these we stopped for our first rest, and to catch up on some of the sleep we’d missed out on the night before.
It wasn’t provided with all the comforts of home, but among the paraphernalia which some kind person had
