Their laughter faded away and he was alone.
Walking aimlessly, Rusty left the deserted clearing, plodded up a sparkling path. He wandered amid the ghastly spangled crags, neither knowing nor caring where he went. It did not matter and nothing mattered, for he was dead inside. The three moons of Pluto hung low in the east and the enormous Great Moon, the nearby satellite of the planet, arose beside their departing light, a darker green.
Soon, another day. The cold wind. The Bugs. Haunted, restless sleep. The scream of a lonely soul in dreaming delirium. But what matter the cold and the Bugs? They could bring death. Was it not better so?
Rusty came to a long declivity, the rocks sloping down to a wide crater. In the center was a pale wall of lichen, smoothly white on the side of a towering peak. It was White Cliff. Largest landmark on the narrow-horizoned planet, it reared for hundreds of feet into the thin air. Upon its vast sides was a thick blanket of the plants, giving the cliff an unbroken, white distinctiveness and its name. Never visited by day because of the Bugs, it was rarely approached even at night. The reflecting vegetation surrounding it in a dim glow, the Bugs lingered even then. Foot-long obscenities of fuzzy yellow, razor-tipped tendrils before formless maws, by day they swarmed from every crevice of the distorted terrain. Subsisting chiefly upon the rabbit-like veedles, they would also eat a man.
Rusty stared at the ghostly scene, suddenly remembering the words of Lothar, the Vulcanian. Preferring the Bugs to curious eyes, it was here that the drift-tubes had been stored, the escape ship built. Escape! Why hadn't he thought of it before? As criminal as they now, he must take a criminal's chance—the odds were all against their survival—a swift death in the suffocating void of space, the sudden burn of a patrol's flame-gun. But each was a feeble fear. Death here was slow, gnawing for years at a weakening brain. Any chance was worth taking.
He glanced over his shoulder at the rising shape of the Great Moon, and sped across the quartz dust to the cliff.
Rounding the rise, Rusty came upon a dark form in a little clearing. It was the ship. Startled figures whirled as he burst upon them, relaxed as he was recognized. The great bulk of Lothar was stark against the dim light.
"Hello!" came a husky Earthian voice, and Rusty was relieved to see the barrel shape of Spike appear, his mop of black hair haloed in the green glow.
Rusty looked at the squat hull of the oddly constructed boat. The others gathered around him.