A starving waif named Sheila Moore, who begged him for help, because he was Eric Falken and almost a god to the Unregenerates. They got away in the _Falcon_, but the Hiltonist ships followed. Driven, hopeless flight, desperate effort to shake pursuit before he was too close to the Sun. Time and again, using precious fuel and accelerations that tried even his tough body, Falken thought he had escaped. But they found him again. It was uncanny, the way they found him. Now he couldn't run any more. At least he'd led the Hiltonists away from the pitiful starving holes where his people hid, on the outer planets and barren asteroids and dark derelict hulks floating far outside the traveled lanes. And he'd kill himself before the Hiltonist psycho-search could pick his brain of information about the Unregenerates. Kill himself, if he could wake up. He began to laugh, a drunken, ragged chuckle. He couldn't stop laughing. He clung to the panel edge and laughed until the tears ran down his scarred, dark face. "Stop it," said Sheila Moore. "Stop it, Falken!" "Can't. It's funny. We live in hell for thirty years, we Unregenerates, fighting Hiltonism. We're licked, now. We were before we started. "Now I'm going to die so they can suffer hell a few weeks more. It's so damned funny!" * * * * * Sleep dragged at him. Sleep, urgent and powerful. So powerful that it seemed like an outside force gripping his mind. His hands relaxed on the panel edge. "Falken," said Sheila Moore. "Eric Falken!" Some steely thing in her voice lashed him erect again. She crouched on the shelf bunk against the wall, her feral green eyes blazing, her thin body taut in its torn green silk. "You've got to get away, Falken. You've got to escape." He had stopped laughing. "Why?" he asked dully. "We need you, Falken. You're a legend, a hope we cling to. If you give up, what are we to go on?" She rose and paced the narrow deck. Paul Avery watched her from the bunk on the opposite wall, his amber eyes dull with the deep weariness that slackened his broad young body. Falken watched her, too. The terrible urge for sleep hammered at him, bowed his grey-shot, savage head, drew the strength from his lean muscles. But he watched Sheila Moore. That was why he had risked his life, and Avery's, and broken Unregenerate law to save her, unknown and untested. She blazed, somehow. She stabbed his brain with the same cold fire he had felt after Kitty was taken from him. "You've got to escape," she said. "We can't give up, yet." Her voice was distant, her raw-gold hair a detached haze of light. Darkness crept on Falken's brain. "How?" he whispered. "I don't know ... Falken!" She caught him with thin painful fingers. "They're driving you down on Mercury. Why not trick them? Why not go--beyond?" He stared at her. Even he would never have thought of that. Beyond the orbit of Mercury there was only death.