Jonner finished his excavation and laid Stein gently to rest in it. He
pushed rocks back in to fill it up, and wrested a boulder that would
have weighed a ton over it for a monument. Then he murmured a brief
prayer over the grave.
Kraag was ashamed and then, unaccountably, angry. But he stood at the
port, drinking his coffee and watching Jonner, and said nothing.
Either with chalk or with some soft rock he had found--Kraag could not
tell which--Jonner wrote something on the big stone that was Stein's
monument. Then he stood up and turned toward the sphere.
"Kraag," he said. "Kraag, are you tuned in?"
"Yes," replied Kraag shortly.
"You have today to surrender. Tonight I'm going to hatch you out of
your comfortable egg."
Kraag switched off the communications system and paced the room, anger
burning slowly inside him. This was ridiculous. He held all the cards.
He had the guns, he had the sphere. Jonner was outside, weaponless,
with a limited supply of food and water. Yet Jonner had him on the
defensive.
How had it happened? How could it happen? Kraag lit a cigarette and
puffed at it slowly, applying his mind coldly to the situation.
He didn't doubt that Jonner would do as he threatened, but he didn't
think it was the recklessness of desperation. More likely, Jonner
deliberately, calculatingly, planned to reduce his own chances for
comfort, in order to bring Kraag down to more even terms with him.
If Jonner broke the hull of the sphere, it could be repaired--by
someone working outside, free from interruption by an enemy. Until it
was repaired, it would mean that Kraag, too, would have to live in
a spacesuit. And Jonner might knock open a hole, or more than one,
big enough to permit him to enter the sphere and attack Kraag in the
darkness.
If only he could surround the sphere with light at night, he could keep
Jonner at a distance. But with the solar mirror gone, the searchlight,
on top of the sphere's other electrical requirements, would discharge
the batteries before the night was half gone.
Kraag knew Jonner's stubbornness, his resourcefulness, his raw courage.
Jonner was the one of them who was really at bay, when you considered
it. Yet Kraag felt that Jonner was closing in on him, gradually,
inexorably.
Facing this, Kraag felt the steel enter his own will. He wasn't a
coward. He had just been expecting this to be too easy. If Jonner would
force him to fight, he would fight. He still had the advantage.
He must abandon the sphere as an asset. Jonner could take that away
from him anyhow. On the other hand, if Jonner took over the sphere,
Kraag could use the same weapon against him. He could break open the
sphere.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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