it."

The crack led down into a cave, or chamber, too irregularly shaped to be
artificial, too smoothly surfaced and floored to be natural. There was
nothing in it but a block of stone, nine feet or so long and about four
feet wide by five feet high. It seemed to be a natural part of the
floor, but Hyrst avoided it. On the opposite, the sunward side, there
was a small windowlike aperture that admitted a ray of blinding
radiance, sharply defined and doing nothing to illumine the dark on
either side of it.

Vernon's thought came to them, hard, triumphant, peremptory. "Mr.
Bellaver says you have ten minutes to come out. After that, no mercy."

CHAPTER V

The minutes slid past, sections of eternity arbitrarily measured by the
standards of another planet and having no relevance at all on this tiny
whirling rock. The beam of light from the small aperture moved visibly
across the opposite wall. Hyrst watched it, blinking. Outside,
Bellaver's men were drawn up in a wide crescent across the hill in front
of the catafalque. They waited.

"No mercy," said Hyrst softly. "No mercy, is it?" He bent over and began
to loosen the clamps that held the lead weights to the soles of his
boots.

"It isn't mercy we need," said Shearing. "It's time."

"How much?"

"Look for yourself."

Hyrst shifted his attention to space. There was a ship in it, heading
toward the asteroid, and coming fast. Hyrst frowned, doing in his head
without thinking about it a calculation that would have required a
computer in his former life.

"Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds," he said, "inclusive of the
four remaining."

He finished getting the weights off his boots. He handed one to
Shearing. Then he half-climbed, half-floated up the wall and settled
himself above the entrance, where there was a slight concavity in the
rock to give him hold.

"Shearing," he said.

"What?" He was settling himself beside the mouth of the crack, where a
man would have to come clear inside to get a shot at him.

"A starship implies the intention to go to the stars. Why haven't you?"

"For the simplest reason in the world," said Shearing bitterly. "The
damn thing can't fly."

"But--" said Hyrst, in astonishment.

"It isn't finished. It's been building for over seventy years now, and a
long and painful process that's been, too, Hyrst--doing it bit by bit in
secret, and every bit having to be dreamed up out of whole cloth, and
often discarded and