"Yes?" jeered Fallon. "Tell that to the aviators! The spacemen don't believe you!" Then he said: "So what? I'll be the first man on Mars! I'm Joe Fallon, 4272365, Walla Walla Penitentiary, and I'll go down in the history books. I'm taking off for Mars. Want to race?"
There was a sudden roaring. It was the sound of a rocket blast, conducted by metal to a space suit and picked up by the microphone inside.
"T-taking off," gasped Fallon, outside. "You get this story back to Earth and he won't dare do anything! He won't dare! But I didn't rat on him! Only on what he was going to do."
After that, there was only the roar of the rocket blast.
They poured out of the ship in space suits as fast as the air lock would let them. Perhaps some of them had a faint, faint hope that it was merely a joke. But it wasn't. There were boxes and bales floating heavily, soggily, in the emptiness about Eros. They had been thrust aside when Fallon took the rocket for himself. And he was gone.
McCauley made an irresolute movement back toward the ship, and Randy said quickly, via space phone:
"No use, Ed! We can't make more than six gees acceleration in the ship, and in a loadless rocket he'll make twelve! We can't catch him!"
And there'd be nothing they could do if they did catch him. McCauley ground his teeth, staring at the star-filled sky.
"I did something wrong," he said bitterly. "Something wrong! But what would have been the right thing?"
Hathaway said enviously: