As Dorothy stared at him, unbelieving, he vaulted over the rim and jolted with stinging feet to the hot gravel outside. The metal ladder was like a live coal in his hands but he barely felt it as he threw it against the wall and ran up it like a squirrel. Sitting on the cooling rim, he drew the ladder up after him and dropped it inside for Dorothy.
Soon they were streaking across the steaming gravel toward the house, Dorothy's hair streaming in the smoky wind.
Norman burst into the big front room with Dorothy behind him. Their running feet were loud in the silent house as they sped down the corridor, Norman dreading what he would find tied to the cylinder where they had left Keren. "You don't want to see this," he said, halting at the closed door. "Try these other doors and find a gun. Sade may be back any moment!"
Dorothy obediently turned away as he went in and the sight that met his eyes was to figure in many a future nightmare. Half way between the door and the cylinder, Keren lay on the floor, more like some hideous reptile than a human being, staring up at him, her eyes two black holes, hate alive in them, the only life in what was left of her face.
Norman stepped over and picked her up, his fingers recoiling from the touch of leathern skin and bone. Her luxurious hair had vanished leaving a skull, cracked skin tight across her cheek bones. The rope that had held her to the cylinder had slipped from her shrunken wrists and how she had crawled this far, Norman couldn't tell.
He carried her to the cylinder, opened the heavy cap and drew out the small hose that Sade had used to restore to youth the white rat. Quickly, he sprayed the pink liquid upon her face and body—a treatment that was to rewrite all of medical science. Her cheeks swelled again to the form of a living face and like a trick of superimposed motion picture work, before his eyes Keren's skeletal structure became covered again with firm, rounded flesh, and on her head wispy black threads appeared and extended again into a silken sable mass.
To save the spark of life that remained with Johnny, Norman knew he had to get this material back to Earth now; which meant a finish fight for a space ship. "Are you strong enough now? We've got to ambush Sade."
It was an effort for Keren to reorganize her forgotten coordinations which enabled her to speak. Her lips moved soundlessly as he carried her to the door and down the passage. He explained quickly how he and Dorothy had escaped.
"There are guns in the tower," she managed to whisper as they entered the front room.
Dorothy stood at the door with two jet rifles, peering out at the still deserted field. "I found these in their bedroom," she said, handing Norman one of the guns. "Is she all right? I thought—"