The going was hard. The dust clung like honey to their feet, and eddied and swirled about them until the purifying systems in their suits were hard-pressed to remove the fine stuff working in at joints and valves. "Are we going straight?" Rodney asked. "Of course," Martin growled. There was silence again, the silence of almost-exhausted determination. The two men lifted their feet out of the dust, and then laboriously plunged forward, to sink again to the knees, repeated the act, times without number. Then Wass broke his silence, taunting. "The ship leaves in two hours, Martin. Two hours. Hear me, Rodney?" Martin pulled his left foot from the sand and growled deep in his throat. Ahead, through the confusing patterns of the sparkling dust, his flashlight gleamed against metal. He grabbed Rodney's arm, pointed. A grate. Rodney stared. "Wass!" he shouted. "We've found a way out!" Their radios recorded Wass' laughter. "I'm at the switchboard now, Martin. I--" There was a tinkle of breaking glass, breaking faceplate. The grate groaned upward and stopped. Wass babbled incoherently into the radio for a moment, and then he began to scream. Martin switched off his radio, sick. He turned it on again when they reached the opening in the metal wall. "Well?" "I've been trying to get you," Rodney said, frantically. "Why didn't you answer?" "We couldn't do anything for him." Rodney's face was white and drawn. "But he did this for us." "So he did," Martin said, very quietly. Rodney said nothing. Then Martin said, "Did you listen until the end?" Rodney nodded, jerkily. "He pulled three more switches. I couldn't understand it all. But--Martin, dying alone like that in a place like this--!" Martin crawled into the circular pipe behind the grate. It tilted up toward the surface. "Come on, Rodney. Last lap." An hour later they surfaced about two hundred yards away from the edge of the city. Behind them the black pile rose, the dome of force shimmering, almost invisible, about it. Ahead of them were the other two scoutships from the mother ship. Martin called out faintly, pulling Rodney out of the pipe. Crew members standing by the scoutships, and at the edge of the city, began to run toward them. "Radio picked you up as soon as you entered the pipe," someone said. It was the last thing Martin heard before he collapsed. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Dust Unto Dust, by Lyman D. Hinckley