"Like a damn Judas goat," he muttered, and Burdick spoke from beside him.
"They took that lady officer away," he said. "I reckon she's in trouble?"
Wyatt said, "The worst. She was going to help us escape."
Burdick said shrewdly, "Bill and me figured it was something like that. Too bad it went wrong."
Wyatt explained why it had gone wrong. "I should have been content with what I had. But I thought if—oh, what the devil's the use of hashing it over!" He looked at the steel rods that separated them from the Alpha Centaurians. "If we could just get those bars out of the way, get all together, the twelve of us—we might still do something. This is a small ship. It can't carry much of a crew, probably not more than five or six beside Makvern. If we could rush them and take the ship, we might be able to force them to fly it to Earth—"
Moonshine. Fool's talk, the babble of desperation. On the other hand, what did they have to lose?
Their lives, of course. But that would have to be up to the individual. As far as Wyatt was concerned, the pit was no beautiful prospect.
And if they succeeded—if—
"Well," said Whitfield, "let's get cracking." He crooked his finger at the Arab, the Turcoman, and No-Name.
In the spaceship, with the incredible panorama of space and the racing war fleet beyond the observation panels, the six Earthmen held a conference, speaking to each other not in their own diverse tongues but in the language of Uryx, a place they had never seen and had not even known existed until suddenly it had become the most important thing in their lives.