“For sweet life’s sake, can’t you wait for a lame, old soldier, climbing like a dog hi a treadmill, with his hair blown out by the roots!”
They climbed again, up a huge, still blade, and out along the massive, motionless axle.
They ran upright into the vast, horizontal intake tube and came to the bottom of another vertical pit.
“Light!” exulted John Star.
“The sky!”
A square bright patch, at the top of the shaft, shone like a beacon of welcome.
It was not the sky, however, but only the undersurface of the great landing stage.
Up the last short ladder, and over a low metal wall, and they stood at last upon the tower’s roof.
Flat, and tiled with purple glass, the enormous roof was spaced with the openings of other ventilator shafts, and crowded with the forest of gigantic piers that supported the immense platform of the flying stage, yet another hundred feet above.
“They will know we’re up here,” Jay Kalam reminded them gently. “From the fan.
No time to waste.”
They ran to the edge of the roof, and climbed again, up the diagonal lattice-work of an enormous vertical member.
The last five feet, around the edge of the gigantic, metal platform, John Star climbed alone.
Clinging like a human fly, he peered cautiously over the edge of the immense flat table.
A mere hundred feet away lay the nose of the Purple Dream.
A slender bright arrow, the flagship was ashimmer under the small sun which burned hot through the thin air of Phobos.
The Purple Dream!
Only thirty yards away, it was freedom and safety and the means to search for Aladoree.
Trimly slender, beautiful; the newest, finest, fleetest cruiser of the Legion fleet.
A splendid hope, and hopeless.
Her air-lock was sealed, her bright armor impregnable.
Twelve Legionnaires, armed, stood in line beneath her valves, wearily alert.
What madness, for the four to think of taking her!
Four tattered fugitives, bruised, exhausted, with not one weapon save their bodies, and a thousand hunting them.
What madness, when the cruiser was the System’s most powerful fighting machine!
John Star knew it was madness, yet he dared to plan.
9 “To the Runaway Star!”
He climbed back to the others, mutely eager Hal Samdu, cool, composed Jay Kalam, wheezing, groaning Giles Habibula.
“The Purple Dream is there.
Her valve toward us, sealed.
A dozen men guarding her.
But I think I see a way—a chance.”
“How?”
He explained, and Jay Kalam nodded, offering quiet suggestions.
“We’ll try it.
We can do no better.”
They climbed down the pier to the roof again, Giles Habibula complaining bitterly at the new effort.
They ran diagonally across the purple tiles among the maze of beams, and clambered wearily up again to the platform, to the edge behind the Purple Dream.
Again John Star looked above the surface.
No sentry, no searcher, was now in view.
That herculean climb up the shaft, three thousand feet, the last thousand against a hurricane, the escape through the blades of the fan—all that must not have been comprehended in the plans of their pursuers.
The flat platform.
The side of the Purple Dream, fifty feet away, a shimmering curve of armor.
Purple-blue sky above and beyond.
“Now,” he whispered.
“All clear!”
In seconds, he was over the edge, although even for his trained body it was an awkward scramble.
Hal Samdu, with his help, came more easily.
Giles Habibula, hauled limp and green-faced over the edge, looked once three thousand feet down, to the purple roofs of the wings and the green convexity of the tiny planet, and grew suddenly and amazingly ill.
“Sick!” he groaned.