He showed her a photographic print. Sattell had made it from the infra red image on the full color photograph. It was an enlargement, showing more detail than Borden had seen with the naked eye. There were shadows on this print, the shadows of structures. There were buildings rising from the white. There were towers. There was a city on the white spot from which a heat-ray had been projected at the Danaë out in space!
Quite as important, the threadlike lines they had noticed were here plainly highways leading away from it. One led north, judging directions from the shadows. It reached toward the polar ice-cap near which the small space-ship was grounded.
"If Sattell really expects us to kill him," said Borden, "he could have headed for that highway. He might expect to make a deal with our enemies by selling us out. Even if they killed him out of hand, the fact that he was an alien would make them hunt for us. So he could figure that he might make friends, but even if he didn't he would be sure to ruin us. A win for him either way."
Ellen paled a little. "And the drive's pulled down and Jerry's gone."
"So there's nothing to do but wait and see," said Borden.
He tried to work on the space-drive. All its parts were spread out on the drive room floor. When they'd repaired it before, it had been so thoroughly fused that a part looked good even if repaired to the accuracy of a bent wax candle straightened out by hand.
Now the repairs looked very bad. It seemed incredible that anything so clumsily made should have worked. But Borden couldn't keep his mind on it.
"Just on the off chance, Ellen," he said abruptly, "you will not leave the ship by yourself. We'd better replace the lock-door fastening, too. If we do have visitors from the city on the white spot, that won't stop them. But it might keep them from taking us off-guard."
He opened the thief-proof locker where an essential part of the lock-catch had been stored, to protect it from Sattell. It had a combination fastening, intended merely to prevent pilfering when the ship was in a space-port.