If not, better wait and see. He waited, shifting his gun only a little from weariness as the minutes dragged on, wondering if he had not made a mistake in waiting at all.
Finally Stone stirred and groaned. Corriston bent and shook him by the shoulders. He took firm hold of his shoulders and shook him vigorously, feeling no pity for him at all.
He got the truth out of him by threatening him with violence, by threatening to kill him if he kept anything back. Stone kept nothing back. Just remembering the blow that had felled him, loosened his tongue. But the gun helped too, the gun wedged so closely against his ribs under his heart that he feared that if he breathed too heavily he would breathe his last.
"I won't lie to you," he said desperately, pleadingly. "You haven't a chance. There's a photoelectric alarm system outside the compartment, and Jim Saddler is sitting just inside the door. He has a gun trained on her. His orders are to shoot her dead if anyone so much as attempts to get inside that door."
"Meaning me?"
"It means you, Lieutenant. I'm not lying; I swear it. You won't stand a chance. Henley will be coming back in a few hours now. You'd better get out while you're still in one piece."
Corriston was tempted to hurl Stone back against the wall and shout at him: "It doesn't matter whether I go out of here in one piece or dead on a stretcher. She's the only thing I care about."
But he caught himself just in time. Stone thought in the most primitive imaginable terms. You couldn't go to a Stone Age man and say: "My own skin doesn't mean a goddam thing to me. I'm in love. If she dies I die. Can't you understand that? If she dies, my life will be over."
He said instead: "All right. I guess it means I've got to get help."
"You'll never get help," Stone said, summoning from some defiant depths within himself a little courage. "The colony is eighty-seven miles from here. You couldn't cross the desert on foot. No one could cross it on foot, not when the temperature drops at night to fifty below. But you'd better not stay. He'd better head for Ramsey's citadel. That's your only chance. It's only twenty miles from here."