He would make no promise, or answer. He waited. And they heard the purr of the fast power-boat, less than an hour later. Dawn was gray in the eastern sky when Fairlie, and one armed man in Evacuation Police uniform, came up the steps to the pedestal. Wales stepped out, the Venn gun levelled, and Kendrick came out behind him. Fairlie stopped. The Police officer with him made an uncertain sound and movement. "Don't be stupid," Fairlie said. "He's got us cold." He came up a few more steps. He looked up at Wales, and there was in his powerful face an immense disgust. "You're proud, aren't you, Wales?" said Fairlie. "You think you've done something big and gallant. You've saved, or tried to save, a lot of human lives and that makes you happy." He suddenly raged. "Human refuse! The weak, the unfit, the no-damned-good, that we've been saddled with all our lives here on Earth--and now we must take them with us to drag us all down on Mars." "Don't, Jay," whispered Martha, and her voice was a painful sound. Fairlie said: "Let him. I'd sooner go out now as see all human civilization dragged down out there by the weight of the useless rabble who would be better dead." Wales said, "You're so sure, just who should live and who should die. You felt such a big man, making secret decisions like that, didn't you? Fairlie, who knows what's best for everybody. You and your pals liked that feeling, didn't you? There have always been characters like you--" He paused, and then he said, "We're going over to New York. We're going to have Kendrick tell his story to all the millions still on Earth, and it's a story that two of your own men will back up. We're going to try to get every last soul off Earth before Doomsday. But if we don't--" "If you don't?" sneered Fairlie. "You'll know it," said Wales, and now he was shaking. "Because you, Fairlie, will not leave Earth till every last soul is evacuated. If any human being faces Doomsday here, you'll face it right with him." CHAPTER IX Over New York there hung in the sky a new moon, big and red and terrifying. Once it had been a mere track, on an astronomical photo, a figure in a calculation. Once it had been a threat, but an abstract one. Now it was real at last. Week by week, it had grown from a spark to a speck to a little moon, and now Kendrick's World was rushing in fast toward the fatal rendezvous with its bigger, sister world. Wales sat at his desk in the office high in the UN tower, and looked out the window at the skyscrapers looming strange in the bloody light. There was a great silence everywhere. The frantic thunder of the Marslift was stilled at last. The last-but-one rockets had left at dusk, and now as night advanced it seemed that the whole Earth was hushed and waiting.