"Better to have you keeping watch than handling a pick and shovel, or pushing a barrow," he had told her. "But I hate to see you go so far off. Something might happen. If they find us, though, they will probably get us all. Don't get hurt."
Bill had seen the Prince looking anxiously at the slender, brown-eyed girl as they entered the air-lock. He had seen him move forward quickly, as though to ask her to come back—move forward, and then turn aside with a flush that became a bitterly cynical smile.
As Bill walked across the top of the barren red plateau, he looked back at the girl moving slowly in the opposite direction. He had glanced at her eyes as they left the ship. They were shadowed, heavy-lidded. In their brown depths lurked despair and tragic determination. Bill, watching her now, thought that all life had gone out of her. She seemed a dull automaton, driven only by the energy of a determined will. All hope and life and vivacity had gone from her manner. Yet she walked as if she had a stern task to do.
"I wonder——" Bill muttered. "Can she mean—suicide?"
He turned uncertainly, as if to go after her. Then, deciding that his thought was mere fancy, he trudged on across the red plateau to his station.
Behind him, he saw other parties emerging from the air-lock. The Prince and Dr. Trainor were setting up apparatus of some kind, probably, Bill thought, to take magnetic and meteorological observations. Men with prospecting hammers were scattering over all the plateau.
"Almost any sort of ferruginous rock is sure to contain the tiny amount of cerium we need," Dr. Trainor had said.
Bill reached the end of the plateau. The age-worn cliffs of red granite and burned lava fell sheer for a hundred feet, to a long slope of talus. Below the rubble of sand and boulders the flat desert stretched away, almost visibly curving to vanish beneath the near red horizon.
It was a desolate and depressing scene, this view of a dead and sun-baked planet. There was no sign of living thing, no moving object, no green of life—the canals, with their verdure, were far out of sight.