The heavy-muscled guard delegated to remain with Steel took it all with a yawn, however, leaning against a battery case and eyeing Steel sleepily. And this was what made Steel want to tear his hair—the utter confidence of everyone here. The fact that the police were on the way seemed to bother them only slightly. They seemed quite convinced they had here the power of a science that need fear nothing the whole world might send against them.
"I suppose you're making your getaway with some sort of electric expulsion system," Steel said finally. From combustion power to jet propulsion—it was just one step further to the ultimate speeds of some expulsion system. There had always been a basic flaw in vehicles having to carry their own means of power. "What bothers me though is where the hell you think you're going." To leave the earth was simple. To have to stay away, forever, in the molten cold or venomous atmosphere of one of the other planets—that should be no happy prospect for any fugitive.
"Where we're going?" Steel's guard laughed quickly. "Buddy, that's something you'll be mighty interested in if Miss Harmon has a mind to tell you about it." And Steel saw the girl walking toward them, wiping a smudge of grease from her cheek. "He wants to know where we're going," the guard grinned as she came up.
She also laughed, a tinkling laugh that Steel hated more because he would have liked it if she hadn't been who and what she was. "Bring him along," she told the guard. "Everything seems to be running smoothly. We'll take a moment off to show him around."
The big fellow gave Steel a shove and followed him and the girl past the generators toward the far end of the room. When they got there, Steel saw there wasn't any wall at the room's end. The room ended abruptly at a two hundred foot drop.
The exit here was only a hole in the wall of a vast cavern, big as a city block. The place had been hollowed out of the earth's ice crust. Its slick green walls glistened brightly under thousands of heat arcs that melted, dried, held back the constantly encroaching cold. On the floor of the cavern, Steel saw what appeared to be a monster space ship, a smooth egg-like thing with a small platform on top. So this was what they planned to escape in! Pile in, melt the ice lid off the cavern, take off! He didn't see them at first—they were the same color as the frozen floor. Then he caught sight of the restlessly moving creatures around the ship.
The cavern's floor was alive with ice-bears, thousands of them, gigantic males, grizzly females, pink-clawed cubs, a living moat around the precious ship. Not only had The Bear chained science to her grim purpose. Here were nature's cruelest watchdogs on guard.
"Okay," Steel said at last. "So I'm impressed. Now will you tell me where you plan to go in that ship?"
"Ship?" The girl's smile grew perplexed. "What ship?"
Steel motioned toward the egg-shaped thing below. "That. That's the space ship you plan to get away in, isn't it?"