Lolan stood rigid, letting the idea revolve in his mind. Abruptly, he swung from the window, jamming the bracelet onto his own wrist. He left his room silently, and through the dim corridors he found his way to the commissionary. His private keys unlocked the dark vaults. Carefully shutting the door, he switched on the lights.
Piles of goods were everywhere, looming in long rows before him and filling great bins. The Martian's nerves set up a raw tingling as he found a box and hurried to a bin. Five nervous minutes passed, with Lolan piling preserved foods of all kinds into the box. As a last item, he buried a pair of sadon pistols in the mass of foodstuffs.
Grim resolution was in the hard set of his jaw when he switched off the lights, re-locked the place, and left by a back entrance. He was able to reach a pursuit ship in the hangar and load his stuff in without being observed. Panic struck at him, then ... a sentry's running feet sounded outside!
Lolan sprang to the door. He eased through it, to be speared by the man's torch. Casually, he nodded to him.
"Oh! Sorry, sir, I didn't realize it was an officer," the sentry apologized. "Taking your ship out this late?"
Lolan said crisply, "Official business down below. Go back to your post. I can manage it alone."
The sentry clicked his heels, saluted, and departed. Lolan's knees shook a little. He rolled the battered pursuit ship out and hurriedly entered it. Hope that the guard didn't realize he wasn't taking his private ship tonight kept him glancing around at the dim form of the sentry. On that fact hinged his life.
Then he was slamming the accelerator on full. The ship screamed upward, borne aloft on the green mushroom of flame. Almost immediately he had crossed the city and gained the plains beyond. In a broken expanse of rock and sand just outside the lower quarter, he set the craft down gently.
No one saw him enter the city. He threaded the tortuous alleys of the squalid section with his heart hammering in his ears. At last he was stopping across from a large, five-story building. It was a ponderous, gabled affair full of reminiscences of former glory—elaborate cornices crumbling away, great, metal doors green with age, once white walls now streaked with black and gray. In carved Venusian characters, a plaque over the door lamented: "Hall of Justice."
Lolan was thinking of that sad commentary as he ascended to the top floor. Justice—when the man who once ruled this entire planet now lived on crusts in a tiny room in the tower!