Gray scowled, his arrogant Roman profile hard against the flickering aurora. Then he slammed the lock shut. The ship roared out into the tearing winds of the plain. Gray cut in his rockets and blasted up, into the airless dark among the high peaks. Jill Moulton hadn't moved or spoken. Gray snapped on the space radio, leaving his own screen dark. Presently he picked up signals in a code he didn't know. "Listen," he said. "I knew there was some reason for Ward's running out on me." His Indianesque face hardened. "So that's the game! They want to make trouble for you by letting me escape and then make themselves heroes by bringing me in, preferably dead. "They've got ships waiting to get me as soon as I clear Mercury, and they're getting stand-by instructions from somebody on the ground. The somebody that Ward was making for." Jill's breath 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.