"So you win, after all. I think I"m glad, Dark. Now you can go, if you want to."
He shook his head.
"I"m glad you feel that way about it, Maya, but I"m afraid it"s too late. I really shouldn"t have stayed around to serve as your pillow till you awoke."
There was something in his face that caused her to sit up suddenly.
Two uniformed men stood there in the lobby before them, relaxed but watchful, regulation heatguns dangling from their hands. As she sat up, one of them touched his cap and spoke to her:
"We"re police officers from Ophir, Miss Cara Nome. Mr. Eli called from Mars City and directed us to drive over here and help you guard the prisoner until his arrival."
She rose angrily.
"I didn"t ask for your help, so you may go," she said, aware of Dark"s surprised gaze on her. "I made a mistake in identification."
The policeman who had spoken shook his head.
"I"m sorry," he said. "We"re acting on Mr. Eli"s orders, not yours.
We"ll have to hold Mr. Kensington until Mr. Eli arrives."
She glared at them. The one who had spoken was big and burly and efficient-looking. The other was sallow and silent, with a deadly cast to his thin face.
Then she saw her lighter-gun, lying on the lobby floor beside the chair in which she had gone to sleep.
She bent down, casually, and picked it up. She straightened, the little instrument ready in her hand.
"This is not a cigaret lighter, but a heatgun," she said flatly. "I"m in charge here, and I say Mr. Kensington is to be permitted to go free. If any effort is made to stop him, I"ll burn you down."
Both police heatguns swung up in short arcs and trained on her. The burly policeman spoke gently.
"I"m sorry, Miss Cara Nome, but we"re under orders from Mr. Eli, and we intend to follow them," he said. "I"d hate to see you injured, but if you blast either of us the other one will burn off your hand."
"No, Maya!" exclaimed Dark, getting to his feet. "Don"t! There"s no point in your getting hurt for my sake."
She ignored him.
"Drop those heatguns, both of you, or I blast!" she snapped, almost hysterically.
Then Dark hurled himself bodily at the two men.
The thin-faced man swung his heatgun around to meet Dark"s charge. Maya twisted the lighter-gun toward him, and at the same moment the burly policeman threw himself against her. Her heat beam singed the thin-faced one"s shoulder, then she collapsed under the impact of the other"s body.
As she fell, she saw the almost invisible beam of the thin-faced policeman"s heatgun strike Dark directly in the stomach, burning away the cloth, burning a great gaping hole in his abdomen. Dark slid to the floor, writhing, gasping, clutching his stomach.
Her lighter-gun knocked from her hand, Maya struggled, half-dazed, to her feet. The burly policeman had swung his own gun on the prostrate Dark, but the other one, grimacing with the pain of his wounded shoulder, stopped him.
"Let him be," he said. "I like to watch them die."
With a wail, Maya dropped to Dark"s side. She cradled his head against her breast and sobbed as he died in her arms.
9
From the time she saw Dark Kensington die until Nuwell"s arrival at the Chateau Nectaris a day later, Maya remained in her room, half in shock, half in an agony of sorrow and remorse.
She was so exhausted by her ordeal that she did sleep, but it was fitfully and without genuine rest. She had her meals sent up to her room, and ate automatically, not tasting the food.
Rationally, she could in no way blame herself for Dark"s death, but that did not prevent her feeling strongly that her insistence on tracking down the fugitives from the Childress Barber College had made her, directly, his slayer. Her feeling of distress was much deeper and more personal than normal regret at having brought about the death of a friendly enemy while in pursuit of her duty.
Maya realized that in those few hours she had been with Dark and talked to him, something had taken root and flowered that had changed her whole outlook on existence. She did not want to call it love; she was a very practical young woman and did not believe in love on such short notice.
But, in examining her feelings, she was at a loss as to what else to call it.
She had felt a powerful attraction to this man, a tremendous admiration and liking for him, a feeling of _belonging_ in his presence. She had sensed his strength. It had appalled her when she had had to oppose herself to him in keeping him captive, but in other circ.u.mstances she felt it was the sort of strength she could depend on. Willingly, she thought now, she, could have dispensed with everything else in her life, and followed Dark Kensington wherever he chose to wander, a fugitive, among the deserts and lowlands.
And Nuwell? Her feeling for him had not changed. She was still attracted to him and she still admired him. But the admiration she had felt for his sharp, sardonic handling of his opponents in a court of law seemed a little shallow and a little immature in comparison to the sudden onrush of what she sensed about Dark.
Since her early teens, she had been an eager enemy of those rebels whom she conceived to be disrupting the orderly settlement of Mars, and her desire to contribute to the defeat of those rebels had been a disciplining, integrating force in her personality. Yet, in only a few short hours of quiet talk, Dark had cut the foundation from that force and dissipated it.
If only she had not delayed, if only she had made up her mind decisively to what she felt now ... Dark need not have died, she could have freed him, and together they could have left Solis Lacus. With him, she would have fought as hard for the rebel cause as, in the past, she had fought against it.
But now it was too late. And, moping tearfully in her room, she found that she didn"t care any more, one way or another, about the struggle between Marscorp and the rebels.
By the time Nuwell arrived from Mars City, she had regained control over her feelings. When he telephoned her in her room, she went down to the lobby to meet him, pale but composed.
She had a strange feeling as she came out into the big lobby, arching up above its balconies, a feeling as though she had been away in a distant land for a very long time and was just returning to the world she had known all her life. In this returning, she looked upon things with new ideas, and they did not appear the same as before.
This was the same s.p.a.cious lobby across which she had walked to register when she came to Solis Lacus from Mars City a few days ago. It was the same lobby in which, looking down from the balcony, she had seen Dark Kensington arriving. It was the same lobby in which she had sat with Dark and talked for so long. But it seemed a strange place, a different place, one that looked like the lobby she remembered but in which she had never walked before.
Nuwell was standing across the lobby with the two police officers from Ophir, beside a long wooden box that rested on the floor next to the registration counter. Behind the counter, Quelman Gren, the manager of Chateau Nectaris, was sorting the day"s mail.
Nuwell saw her, detached himself from the others and came across the lobby to meet her. As he approached, she experienced the same feeling toward him that she had felt toward the lobby: he was like someone she had known, but a different person.
There was a worried frown on Nuwell"s face, and he managed to get something of disapproval in his greeting kiss.
"It"s lucky I called Ophir and had those men sent over here," were his first words. "If they hadn"t gotten here when they did, that rebel might have killed you and escaped. I told you, Maya, not to try to handle a situation like that."
"It was very astute of you to send them over," answered Maya dryly. "I should have thought of it myself."
"That"s exactly why you shouldn"t try to handle such things alone," said Nuwell, apparently somewhat mollified.
Maya looked into his face, a handsome, youthful face bearing a slightly peeved expression, and she thought two things: she thought of the long and intensive training she had undergone as a terrestrial agent, and she contemplated just how effectively Nuwell might have handled Dark"s capture, had Nuwell been in her place.
"Come on, Maya, let"s clear this up, so we can get out of here and get back to Mars City," said Nuwell, and led her across the lobby to the two policemen and the wooden box.
The two men from Ophir greeted her with a certain embarra.s.sment, and seemed relieved when she smiled wanly at them.