Then the flare dwindled and vanished and Grace Lynton had no way of knowing what had happened outside in the dark. She was sure of only one thing. She couldn't stay inside the house with her husband moving about a few feet from fuel cylinders that might blow up at any moment, for there was at least a fifty percent likelihood that the intruder had accomplished what he'd come to do, before Thomas had seen the light bobbing about in the yard. She had straightened and was hugging her son to her, just starting to turn, when John Lynton's voice rang out sharply from the doorway. "Grace! I blasted at him but he got away! Listen carefully. I've only a moment to talk." He was standing in the doorway with the hand-gun reholstered at his waist, its handle gleaming dully. His pallor was startling, for it went far beyond mere paleness, as if all the blood had been drawn from his face artificially, leaving the skin gray and shrunken. "I can't be sure, but I think ... one of the cylinders has been triggered to blow up," he went on quickly. "It isn't heating up. There'd be no heat--just a faint vibration. When I put my hand on the metal I was almost sure I could feel a vibration. We've got just one chance of staying alive--and I'll have to move fast. I'm going to take it to the Spaceport--I can get there in the conveyor truck in ten minutes--and have them dismantle it. They'll know how. I don't. I'll take all six of the cylinders, to make sure." "John, no! It will blow up in the truck. I'm sure of it. We'd better all get out in the desert, as far away from it as we can. If we start right now and run--" "We could go in the truck, Dad!" Thomas cried. Lynton shook his head. "If just one cylinder blows up--it will take three miles of desert with it. If all six go ... twenty miles of desert. There are at least six thousand Colonists within three or four miles of us. There are less than a thousand people at the Spaceport. Only one big sky ship is still unloading. Better a thousand deaths than six or seven thousand ... if it blows up before they can dismantle it." "But John--Oh, God, I don't know." "It's the best way, the surest way. We can't think only of ourselves. If I drove straight out into the desert with it and it blows up within twenty minutes the fallout would still kill several thousand Colonists. The Spaceport's in the other direction, completely isolated. And I can get there in fifteen minutes ... even if I'm stopped by the Wendel police and have to blast my way to it." "Why should they try to stop you? They'd die themselves--"