, leaving the room
open to the heavens.

"All we have to do now is to climb into it and go," said Dark with
satisfaction. "You fill the fuel tanks, and I'll run down to the motor
pool and pick up those other two marsuits. One of them is for my friend
Happy, who is very fat, and he couldn't wear either of the emergency
suits in the copter."

Maya uncoiled the hose from one of the fuel drums in the room and poked
it into the copter's tank. Dark left the room, walked down the corridor
and descended the stairs.

He made his way to the motor pool. Maya was wearing one of the three
marsuits he had brought down, but the other two were still lying on the
floor. He picked them up and started back.

He was walking down the first floor corridor, carrying the marsuits,
when there crashed in on his mind a terrifying, silent scream:

_Help!_

Dark stopped, appalled. It took him a moment to realize that he was
still standing in the corridor. It took him a moment to realize that he
actually had heard nothing.

The corridor stretched away ahead of him, dim and dusty. There was no
movement in it, no sound. It was utterly silent. He stood there, in a
dim, dusty corridor, in waiting silence, holding two marsuits under his
arms.

_Help!_

It was a cry that shrieked in his mind, reverberated in his mind,
touching nothing around him, touching not the silent corridor.

_Maya!_

Dark's mind went out to her, rode up on swift wings to the room above
where she had waited for his return.

He was there, in that room, and there was the helicopter. There was no
Maya there.

But there were figures in the copter, moving.

He was in the copter, and there was Maya, struggling and writhing, as
Nuwell Eli, in a furious concentration of savage energy, bound her into
one of its seats with a length of rope.

Dark touched her mind, and her mind grasped his, desperately.

_Dark, he followed us up here, and hid until you left. He crept up
behind me and seized me. Hurry, Dark, he's taking me away!_

Hurry? Down those corridors, up those steps, when Nuwell already was
sliding into the pilot's seat of the copter?

Frantically, Dark grasped at his only chance of reaching her in time.
Teleportation.

He clamped down with his mind on himself. With a frenzied burst of
strength, he sought to lift himself bodily, to be there in the copter
with them. He put every ounce of energy he possessed into the effort.

And he failed.

He was standing in