It was difficult to see anything in the darkness, and Jerrold began to fear that they might be catapulted into the furnaces themselves. The flares in the sky seemed very close now.
A tiny blue light flashed by that Aram thought must mark the entrance to the stockpiling yards. He scrambled to his feet and pulled Deve up beside him.
"Get ready to jump clear!" he shouted in her ear.
Wind snatched at his words, and the swaying conveyor made standing difficult—almost impossible. Deve clutched at him, trying to keep her balance. And then, without warning, the belt slammed abruptly into a flat right-angle turn, pitching them off into darkness filled with hurtling chunks of ore.
Aram clung to the girl as they spilled off the belt and banged hard into a great pile of ore. More of the stuff continued to flood down on them from the conveyor above, burying them under an oppressive weight. Desperately, Jerrold clawed his way out into the open, and still clinging to Deve, rolled precipitously down the steep slope of the stockpile. They struck the bottom with bone-jarring force and lay there gasping.
A brilliant beam of light sliced through the dusty darkness, pinning them to the ore pile. Motes danced wildly in the gleaming cone. And in one awful flash of insight Aram knew what had happened ... understood the meaning of that tiny blue light he had seen. A dark-light scanner!
Floodlights came on, and the intruders found themselves blinking into a semi-circle of energy rifle muzzles in the hands of grim-faced, black-clad guards.
Aram Jerrold felt his heart sink. They were captured....
Between two files of guards, Deve and Jerrold walked into the city they had hoped to strip of its weapons. The bitterness of their failure rode hard on Jerrold's shoulders. He kept hearing again and again the phrase that Kant Mikal had used: "To save something from the wreckage...." It seemed impossible now. The giants and the furies were gathering. The might of the Thirty Suns would descend like a rain of fire on Kaidor V, and the mindless death nurtured here would sweep the inhabited worlds like a plague. The forces Jerrold had hoped to chain were free now, and threatening, like some ghastly cosmic storm. The teeming cities would crumble, the spaceways would be deserted. Night would fall on man's imperfect, but highest achievement, and he would return to the primeval muck.