But there was no time to think of what she'd done, to wonder if this was murder or the duty of warfare: the man was dead. Half in, half out of the yawning hatchway, sprawled like a bloody puppet, his weapons still in their holsters at his sides. She took them. And even in the light gravity of Callisto, it took nearly all the strength she could summon and all her courage to haul the limp thing that had been a man all the way out of the gaping shaft and then push it, over and over, away from her, away from the hatch that had already begun to automatically swing downward. She squirmed quickly beneath it, found the ladder rungs with her boots, and then clung to the slender ladder in the sudden darkness without moving, her muscles trembling at the edge of panic. To misjudge now was to fall hideously through blackness to certain destruction only God knew how abysmally far below. Then somehow she steeled herself. Made her legs move mechanically; found the next rung below. And then the next and the next. * * * * * The red blindness of exhaustion under the blaze of desert suns flooded over his numbed brain in a dark backwash of pain, and with it were all the past tortures of Prokyman stockades and the hopeless defeat that had lain at the fringe of every movement of his life; Jon Kane could not see and could hear only weirdly distorted sounds for he was, if not yet dead, then close to death, and only through some freak of neural reaction, not quite beyond the threshold of consciousness. But he had not spoken. And now that power was quite lost to him. But he could still somehow feel the animal presence of his torturers, ringed tight around him yet in the tiny, glaring cubicle of polished steel; there was new pain in his shattered face, and he knew it was the freezing carbon dioxide spray designed to shock him back to full consciousness. But now it was only a new pain. There was the voice of Haine. "Hurry up, get him around. If he cashes in before we get anything out of him Stine'll blow a connection. That's a man who hates to lose on an investment." "Didn't invest much. Didn't risk much either, if you ask me. What else was that broken down tank good for anyway? I say kill the--" "Get him around and shut up." The freezing pain again. But the darkness held. New sounds. Stine. "What have you been trying to do, kill him outright? How much have you gotten?" "Nothing yet, sir. He's either the craziest man in the universe or the toughest. Or else he doesn't know anything." "Nonsense! The things this man knows can put us all in the shade, and don't you forget it! But if we don't find out just how much his people still know--or don't know--it'll be your necks as well as mine! They realize there's somebody else besides themselves in Space, now." The darkness seemed to be lifting a little; the numbness seemed to be thawing from his brain, and the pain became more agonizingly acute. "We'll try again, sir--"