“Starboard lifeboat!” he rasped.

He clattered back into the turret. If the Ardazirho watcher had left the bugscreen by now, he had a few minutes’ grace. Otherwise, a nuclear shell would probably write his private doomsday. He snatched up the navigator’s manual and sprang out again.

Kit was already in the lifeboat. Its small engine purred, warming up. Flandry plunged through the lock, dogged it behind him. “I’ll fly,” he panted. “I’m more used to non-Terran panels. You see if you can find some bailing-out equipment. We’ll need it.”

Where the devil was the release switch? The bugwatcher had evidently quit in time, but any moment now he would start to wonder why Flandry and Party weren’t yet out of the spaceship — There! He slapped down a lever. A hull panel opened. Harsh sunlight poured through the boat’s viewscreen. Flandry glanced over its controls. Basically like those he had just studied. He touched the Escape button. The engine yelled. The boat sprang from its mother ship, into the sky.

Flandry aimed southward. He saw the fortress whirl dizzily away, fall below the horizon. And still no pursuit, not even a homing missile. They must be too dumbfounded. It wouldn’t last, of course … He threw back his head and howled out all his bottled-up laughter, great gusts of it to fill the cabin and echo over the scream of split atmosphere.

“What are you doin’?” Kit’s voice came faint and frantic. “We can’t escape this way. Head spaceward before they overhaul us!”

Flandry wiped his eyes. “Excuse me,” he said. “I was laughing while I could.” Soberly: “With the blockade, and a slow vessel never designed for human steering, we’d not climb 10,000 kilometers before they nailed us. What we’re going to do is bail out and let the boat continue on automatic. With luck, they’ll pursue it so far before catching up that they’ll have no prayer of backtracking us. With still more luck, they’ll blow the boat up and assume we were destroyed too.”

“Bail out?” Kit looked down at a land of stones and blowing ash. The sky above was like molten steel. “Into that?” she whispered.

“If they do realize we jumped,” said Flandry, “I trust they’ll figure we perished in the desert. A natural conclusion, I’m sure, since our legs aren’t so articulated that we can wear Ardazirho spacesuits.” He grew grimmer than she had known him before. “I’ve had to improvise all along the way. Quite probably I’ve made mistakes, Kit, which will cost us a painful death. But if so, I’m hoping we won’t die for naught.”

Even riding a grav repulsor down, Flandry felt how the air smote him with heat. When he struck the ground and rolled over, it burned his skin.

He climbed up, already ill. Through his goggles, he saw Kit rise. Dust veiled her, blown on a furnace wind. The desert reached in withered soil and bony crags for a few kilometers beyond her, then the heat-haze swallowed vision. The northern horizon seemed incandescent, impossible to look at.

Thunder banged in the wake of the abandoned lifeboat. Flandry stumbled toward the girl. She leaned on him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I twisted an ankle.”

“And scorched it, too, I see. Come on lass, not far now.”

They groped over tumbled gray boulders. The weather monitor tower rippled before their eyes, like a skeleton seen through water. The wind blasted and whined. Flandry felt his skin prickle with ultraviolet and bake dry as he walked. The heat began to penetrate his bootsoles.

They were almost at the station when a whistle cut through the air. Flandry lifted aching eyes. Four torpedo shapes went overhead, slashing from horizon to horizon in seconds. The Ardazirho, in pursuit of an empty lifeboat. If they had seen the humans below — No. They were gone. Flandry tried to grin, but it split his lips too hurtfully.

The station’s equipment huddled in a concrete shack beneath the radio transmitter tower. The shade, when they had staggered through the door, was like all hopes of heaven.

Flandry uncorked a water bottle. That was all he had dared take out of the spaceboat supplies; alien food was liable to have incompatible proteins. His throat was too much like a mummy’s to talk, but he offered Kit the flask and she gulped thirstily. When he had also swigged, he felt a little better.

“Get to work, wench,” he said. “Isn’t it lucky you’re in Vixen’s weather engineering department, so you knew where to find a station and what to do when we got there?”

“Go on,” she tried to laugh. It was a rattling in her mouth. “You built your idea aroun’ the fact. Let’s see, now, they keep tools in a locker at every unit—” She stopped. The shadow in this hut was so deep, against the fury seen through one little window, that she was almost invisible to him. “I can tinker with the sender, easily enough,” she said. Slow terror rose in her voice. “Sure, I can make it ’cast your message, ’stead o’ telemeterin’ weather data. But … I just now get to thinkin’ … s’pose an Ardazirho reads it? Or s’pose nobody does? I don’t know if my service is even bein’ manned now. We could wait here, an’ wait, an’—”

“Easy.” Flandry came behind her, laid his hands on her shoulders and squeezed. “Anything’s possible. But I think the chances favor us. The Ardazirho can hardly spare personnel for something so routine and, to them, unimportant, as weather adjustment. At the same time, the human engineers are very probably still on the job. Humanity always continues as much in the old patterns as possible, people report to their usual work, hell may open but the city will keep every lawn mowed … Our real gamble is that whoever spots our call will have the brains, and the courage and loyalty, to act on it.”

She leaned against him a moment. “An’ d’you think there’s a way for us to be gotten out o’ here, under the enemy’s nose?”

An obscure pain twinged in his soul. “I know it’s unfair, Kit,” he said. “I myself am a hardened sinner and this is my job and so on, but it isn’t right to hazard all the fun and love and accomplishment waiting for you. It must be done, though. My biggest hope was always to steal a navigation manual. Don’t you understand, it will tell us where Ardazir lies!”

“I know.” Her sigh was a small sound almost lost in the boom of dry hot wind beyond die door. “We’d better start work.”

While she opened the transmitter and cut out the meter circuits, Flandry recorded a message: a simple plea to contact Emil Bryce and arrange the rescue from Station 938 of two humans with vital material for Admiral Walton. How that was to be done, he had no clear idea himself. A Vixenite aircraft would have little chance of getting this far north undetected and undestroyed. A radio message — no, too easily intercepted, unless you had very special apparatus — a courier to the fleet — and if that was lost, another and another—

When she had finished, Kit reached for the second water bottle. “Better not,” said Flandry. “We’ve a long wait.”

“I’m dehydrated,” she husked.

“Me too. But we’ve no salt; heat stroke is a real threat. Drinking as little as possible will stretch our survival time. Why the devil aren’t these places air conditioned and stocked with rations?”

“No need for it. They just get routine inspection … at mid-winter in these parts.” Kit sat down on the one little bench. Flandry joined her. She leaned into the curve of his arm. A savage gust trembled in the hut walls, the window was briefly blackened with flying grit.

“Is Ardazir like this?” she wondered. “Then ’tis a real hell for those devils to come from.”

“Oh, no,” answered Flandry. “Temulak said their planet has a sane orbit. Doubtless it’s warmer than Terra, on the average, but we could stand the temperature in most of its climatic zones, I’m sure. A hot star, emitting strongly in the UV, would split water molecules and kick the free hydrogen into space before it could recombine. The ozone layer would give some protection to the hydrosphere, but not quite enough. So Ardazir must be a good deal drier than Terra, with seas rather than oceans. At the same time, judging from the muscular strength of the natives, as well as the fact they don’t mind Vixen’s air pressure, Ardazir must be somewhat bigger. Surface gravity of one-point-five, maybe. That would retain an atmosphere similar to ours, in spite of the sun.”