"You've got brains, Ganti. What's the chance of escape?"
"None," said Ganti unemotionally. "You'd better get out of the sun. It'll burn you badly. Come along."
He led the way over the bare, scorching rocky surface. He turned past a small pinnacle. There was shadow. Jorgenson crawled into it, and found himself in a cave. It was not a natural one. It had been hacked out, morsel by morsel. It was cool inside. It was astonishingly roomy.
"How'd this happen?" demanded Jorgenson the business man.
"This is a prison," Ganti explained matter-of-factly. "They let me down here and dropped food and water for a week. They went away. I found there'd been another prisoner here before me. His skeleton was in this cave. I reasoned it out. There must have been others before him. When there is a prisoner here, every so often a copter drops food and water. When the prisoner doesn't pick it up, they stop coming. When, presently, they have another prisoner they drop him off, like me, and he finds the skeleton of the previous prisoner, like me, and he dumps it overboard as I did. They'll drop food and water for me until I stop picking it up. And presently they'll do the same thing all over again."
Jorgenson glowered. That was his reaction as a person. Then he gestured to the cave around him. There was a pile of dried-out seaweed for sleeping purposes.
"And this?"
"Somebody dug it out," said Ganti without resentment. "To keep busy. Maybe one prisoner only began it. A later one saw it started and worked on it to keep busy. Then others in their turn. It took a good many lives to make this cave."
Jorgenson ground his teeth a second time.
"And just because they'd contradicted somebody who couldn't be wrong! Or because they had a business an official wanted!"