“Mortal sick and dying.
Hold me, lad!
For poor Giles is faint and dying—and he feels he’s falling off the whole blessed moon!”
For all her fleetness and her fighting power, the Purple Dream was not large; one hundred twenty feet long, twenty feet her greatest diameter.
Yet it was not easy to get silently and unobserved on top of her, as John Star’s plan demanded.
They ran beneath the black, projecting muzzle of her port stern rockets, and lifted John Star to it.
And he, again, helped the others up.
From the rocket, over the glistening smoothness of her silvery hull, they inched a slow and perilous way up and forward.
Once Giles Habibula fell.
He started to slide down her polished shell, croaking in mute terror; John Star and Hal Samdu caught him, drew him back.
At last they were safely amidships.
There they lay, waiting, atop her flattened hull.
At first they were glad enough to rest, from that superhuman climb.
But the sun beat down on them, through the thin artificial atmosphere of Phobos, blinding, intense, and terrible.
It drove back upon them from the mirror of the hull.
They were blistered, gasping with heat, and thirst came to torture them.
They dared not move; they could only wait.
And their position held a mounting peril.
True, they were invisible from near the ship.
But the bright metal platform, at a distance, was visible, shimmering and dancing in the heat—and any chance searcher there could easily see them on the cruiser.
Two hours, perhaps, they had been broiling on that flat silver grille, when they heard a bell below, and taut, excited voices:
“From the Commander.
He’s going aboard in five minutes.
The cruiser will be ready to take off at once.”
“Have the valve unsealed. Inform Captain Madlok.”
“Wonder where he’s bound?”
“Wants to get away, I guess, until these escaped prisoners are captured.”
“Legion men, they say.
One an old criminal.
All desperate fellows, dangerous.”
“Hiding in the ventilation shafts, they say.”
“Don’t blame the Commander, if he’s going away.
Men clever enough to break out of that prison———”
“They’ve already killed six, in the tubes.”
“Twelve, I heard it—with their own guns!”
The sound of hurried feet on the stair from the elevator.
A ringing clang of metal, as the great outer valve dropped to form a tiny deck under the air-lock.
Feet on the accommodation ladder, entering the vessel.
At last the crisp order:
“All clear!
Close the valves!” “Now!” whispered John Star. He rolled swiftly off the hull, and slid down feet first, to the little platform of the lowered valve.
The jar shook him, but he caught his breath and darted inside the air-lock.
Hal Samdu was a second behind him, then Jay Kalam; Giles Habibula, for all his bulk, was very little later.
In the struggle that followed, they had the advantage of complete surprise.
The first man, at the control mechanism of the valves, was not even armed.
He gasped at sight of John Star, his face abruptly white with panic—for the new reputation of the four had preceded them aboard.
And he tried to run.
John Star caught him.
A sharp jab to a vital plexus, a flat-handed blow near the ear.
He slumped, limp and silent.