The woman sighed audibly. "All right, Thigpen. Don't say I didn't try to give you a chance." Emptiness, defeat, had replaced the desperation in her voice. The amplifier clicked off. A moment later a landing ladder ratcheted into view below the cruiser's cylindrical hull. A man with radiation-pocked skin and an ugly, livid scar down his right cheek appeared in the open hatchway and, locking his legs about the ladder's uprights, slid swiftly to the ground. Another man of the same hard-faced cut followed, and then another. For a moment, the cold-eyed trio paused beneath the ship, adjusting breather-masks and checking short-barreled blasters. Then, spreading out, they moved warily towards the rock pillar behind which their quarry had disappeared. Still there was no visible move from the man addressed as Thigpen. Swinging wide down the slope in a crouch, the scar-faced member of the searching party circled so as to approach the pillar from the rear. A moment later his voice rasped through a hand-amp: "Rack the dirty starbo! He isn't here!" Instantly, the cruiser's speaker clicked on again. "What do you mean, he's not there?" A note of repressed excitement echoed in Veta Hall's words. "He's got to be there, Igor! There's no way he could have broken clear!" The scar-faced man laughed harshly. "That's right, lover-girl. There's no way. So don't waste energy hoping we'll miss him." Now the landing party's two other members came abreast the pillar. A second hand-amp cut in: "There's a little cover over this way, Cheng. Maybe our boy snaked on over to the next outcrop." "How could he? We were watching!" The third man: "Well, you can't find him, can you?" And the second again: "If he played it right, he could have made it, Cheng. After all, he had that column between him and us." "All right, we'll go on to the next rocks, then. And when we find that chitza--!" The trio spread out once more--wading through swirling sand, clambering over jagged ledges. Chill menace showed in their stance and movements. They held their blasters at the ready. Then, reaching the maze-like cluster of monoliths that was their goal, they advanced warily between its towering, weird-etched columns till, one by one, they disappeared from view. Behind them, sand heaved at the base of the rock pillar that had been their first goal. A figure pushed up out of the drifted grit. It was the man from the carrier. Shooting quick glances to right and left, he rose cat-like, then paused momentarily while he tapped sand from his breather-mask's filter. He looked better now than he had before his brief respite, and both his nose and the head-gash had stopped bleeding. Close-knit, of medium height, and obviously under thirty, he moved with lithe coordination. Cool intelligence glinted in the grey eyes. His face, though hardly handsome, combined an intriguingly paradoxical mixture of recklessness and control.