Snyder's expression was ethereal. He threw back his shoulders and braced himself. Then the massive face turned blank as the leg chains were carried away. The second blast freed one arm. Logan dropped the piece of file on the bunk. The fat man stared dumbly, then snatched it up and sawed at the remaining chain with savage joy.
Lt. Mike Logan crawled numbly into his pressure suit, slipped out an escape hatch and dropped to the Moon's cold crust. He couldn't let Snyder die; he couldn't stay with the insane killer free. There was no end to it.
He struck off toward the towering crags of the Alps. His lead wouldn't be much. Snyder with his twisted brain would be after him in a few minutes, but he didn't care how it ended anymore. The giant couldn't escape from the Moon. They'd get him again. But he, Logan, wasn't going to kill.
The horizon was foggy. He could see Bates and the motorsled.
They'd know he'd had the guts....
It was a nightmare, falling, getting up, falling again. He had made it to the first row of foothills when Edward Snyder caught him. The giant had found a knife in the galley and he brandished it over his head, narrowing the distance between them with long leaps. Logan's normal thirty foot Moon strides had fallen to ten. There was nothing left in him. He felt the impact of weight against his back, an arm tighten about his neck and they fell to the rocks. Only a trick of the gravity saved him from the first dipping of the knife.
How long they fought there was no reckoning. Logan could see the giant laughing within his plastic helmet and he thought of Johnny and found the strength to fight. He held his blaster club fashion and struck feebly. He knew it couldn't last long. Nothing as uneven, as unfair as this ever did.
The two pressure-suited bodies bounced over the rocky surface, Snyder's mad thrashing tossing them yards into the air. When they lit the last time something snapped and Logan's arm twisted queerly.
Above them, on a projection of rock, he saw the mimic waving the knife it had acquired to imitate its insane master. Logan summoned all his strength in a desperate gamble on the creature's one virtue. "Do it! Do it! Damn it, do it!"