A World is Born | Page 5

made a small hiss. "Somebody's near the Project...."

Gray snapped on his transmitter.
"Duke Gray, calling all ships off Mercury. Will the flagship of your
reception committee please come in?"
His screen flickered to life. A man's face appeared--the middle-aged,
soft-fleshed, almost stickily innocent face of one of the Solar Systems
greatest crusaders against vice and crime.
Jill Moulton gasped. "Caron of Mars!"
"Ward gave the game away," said Gray gently. "Too bad."
The face of Caron of Mars never changed expression. But behind those
flesh-hooded eyes was a cunning brain, working at top speed.
"I have a passenger," Gray went on. "Miss Jill Moulton. I'm responsible
for her safety, and I'd hate to have her inconvenienced."
The tip of a pale tongue flicked across Caron's pale lips.
"That is a pity," he said, with the intonation of a preaching minister.
"But I cannot stop the machinery set in motion...."
"And besides," finished Gray acidly, "you think that if Jill Moulton dies
with me, it'll break John Moulton so he won't fight you at all."
His lean hand poised on the switch.
"All right, you putrid flesh-tub. Try and catch us!"
The screen went dead. Gray hunched over the controls. If he could get
past them, lose himself in the glare of the Sun....
He looked aside at the stony-faced girl beside him. She was studying
him contemptuously out of hard gray eyes.
"How," she said slowly, "can you be such a callous swine?"

"Callous?" He controlled the quite unreasonable anger that rose in him.
"Not at all. The war taught me that if I didn't look out for myself, no
one would."
"And yet you must have started out a human being."
He laughed.
The ship burst into searing sunlight. The Sunside of Mercury blazed
below them. Out toward the velvet dark of space the side of a waiting
ship flashed burning silver.
Even as he watched, the flare of its rockets arced against the blackness.
They had been sighted.
Gray's practised eye gauged the stranger's speed against his own, and
he cursed softly. Abruptly he wheeled the ship and started down again,
cutting his rockets as the shadow swallowed them. The ship was eerily
silent, dropping with a rising scream as the atmosphere touched the
hull.
"What are you going to do?" asked Jill almost too quietly.
He didn't answer. Maneuvering the ship on velocity between those
stupendous pinnacles took all his attention. Caron, at least, couldn't
follow him in the dark without exhaust flares as guides.
They swept across the wind-torn plain, into the mouth of the valley
where Gray had worked, braking hard to a stop under the cables.
"You might have got past them," said Jill.
"One chance in a hundred."
Her mouth twisted. "Afraid to take it?"
He smiled harshly. "I haven't yet reached the stage where I kill women.
You'll be safe here--the men will find you in the morning. I'm going
back, alone."

"Safe!" she said bitterly. "For what? No matter what happens, the
Project is ruined."
"Don't worry," he told her brutally. "You'll find some other way to
make a living."
Her eyes blazed. "You think that's all its means to us? Just money and
power?" She whispered, "I hope they kill you, Duke Gray!"
* * * * *
He rose lazily and opened the air lock, then turned and freed her. And,
sharply, the valley was bathed in a burst of light.
"Damn!" Gray picked up the sound of air motors overhead. "They must
have had infra-red search beams. Well, that does it. We'll have to run
for it, since this bus isn't armed."
With eerie irrelevancy, the teleradio buzzed. At this time of night, after
the evening storms, some communication was possible.
Gray had a hunch. He opened the switch, and the face of John Moulton
appeared on the screen. It was white and oddly still.
"Our guards saw your ship cross the plain," said Moulton quietly. "The
men of the Project, led by Dio, are coming for you. I sent them,
because I have decided that the life of my daughter is less important
than the lives of many thousands of people.
"I appeal to you, Gray, to let her go. Her life won't save you. And it's
very precious to me."
Caron's ship swept over, low above the cables, and the grinding
concussion of a bomb lifted the ship, hurled it down with the stern end
twisted to uselessness. The screen went dead.
Gray caught the half stunned girl. "I wish to heaven I could get rid of
you!" he grated. "And I don't know why I don't!"

But she was with him when he set out down the valley, making for the
cliff caves, up where the copper cables were anchored.
Caron's ship, a fast, small fighter, wheeled between