Space Station 1

“You’ll never get help.” Stone said, summoning from some defiant depths within himself a little courage. “The colony is eighty-seven miles from here. You couldn’t cross the desert on foot. No one could cross it on foot, not when the temperature drops at night to fifty below. But you’d better not stay. He’d better head for Ramsey’s citadel. That’s your only chance. It’s only twenty miles from here.”

Let him think that, a voice within Corriston warned. Let him think that 111 head for the citadel. Otherwise he may attempt to get word to Ramsey somehow. I can tie him up and leave him in a state of shock, but if he thinks I’m heading for the colony, even a state of shock may not stop him. Saddler may come down here looking for him. Once he’s freed, if he thinks I’m heading for the Colony . . .

Corriston said: “Damn you, Stone, I ought to kill you. I ought to put a bullet through your heart right now. I don't know why I can’t. It’s a weakness in me.”

“I’d kill you, Corriston, if I had the chance. But I’m glad you have that kind of a weakness.”

Corriston stared at him incredulously. “You’re certainly outspoken. You were pleading for your life a moment ago- going soft, as you’d put it. Now you’re talking realistically, analyzing your own motivations and mine.”

“I’m not quite as dumb as you think me, Corriston.”

“All right. Let’s say you’re not dumb. Few people are, when it comes to a matter of life or death. That’s beside the point right now. I’ve got to tie you up. Where can I find some rope?”

“It would be much simpler to lock me in a vacant compartment.”

“All right. Then 111 lock you in one of the compartments.

You can pick your own compartment. I’d advise you not to waste my time. Pick your own compartment and 111 slide the bolt fast on the outside.”

Stone showed no disposition to put up an argument. Corriston kept the gun pressed into the small of his back and he seemed to realize that his life hung by a thread.

They found a compartment that was small and dark, and into it Stone walked at gunpoint, offering no protest, and answering the questions Corriston put to him readily enough.

“You’ll find all the equipment you need at the end of this passageway,” Stone said. '“Activate the third door on your left. Anything else you’d like to know.”

Corriston shook his head. He walked out of the compartment backwards, keeping his gun trained on Stone until he was in the corridor. Then he swung the door shut and shot the bolt home.

He had no trouble at all in finding the equipment he knew he’d, need, thanks to Stone’s generosity. Stone could afford to be generous, he reflected bitterly. The Henley combine still held all of the trump cards.

He cursed the time it took him to equip himself for a near-suicidal crossing of eight-seven miles of Martian desert. He would travel on foot, after nightfall, and in freezing cold. The compartment in which he labored was a basal compartment, and set in the massive bulkhead, against which he leaned with his bootstraps still unlaced, was an airlock opening directly on the Martian plain.

He collected the smaller articles first, setting them down in a row on a long metal bench directly opposite the airlock: three compasses, each weighing perhaps twenty ounces; a cathode ray compass; a non-magnetic compass and a sun compass. The sun compass would perhaps prove the most valuable until darkness fell. The sun, shining down with brilliance from the clear Martian sky, could throw a directional kind of shadow, enabling a man on foot to take fairly accurate bearings without the use of sighting and viewing instruments.

To the compasses on the bench he added five map coordinates and a Lambert conformal projection chart.

Food concentrates came next: four shining aluminum cubes, four inches by four inches, which would go into the knapsack on his back. Then a canteen, already filled with sterilized water from the ship’s central water supply system.

Next, he took from the locker the right kind of clothing: a tubeflex inner suit with a warm lining and a heavy outer suit equipped with heat lamps.

Oxygen masks next — oxy-respirators, to be exact. One to attach to the face and one to hold in reserve as a spare. They covered only a third of the face, but that third had everything to do with a man’s staying alive and vigorous in the thin air of Mars. When night fell, and the cold descended, oxy-respirators were not enough. Then you had to pull down the entire front of your helmet and stagger on with your sight impaired, for in a cold that was almost beyond endurance, helmets had a way of clouding over from time to time.

The clouding over of the vision plate was not too important. It could be constantly wiped clean. But if his brain started “clouding over” too . . .

He dismissed the possibility from his mind. He was clothed now, fully clothed, and ready to depart.