Then at last I dared not hold the attraction longer. With all the tiny plates in my suit electronized to full repulsion, I began slackening my fall. Still I had not glimpsed Carson. Disappointment was within me. What a long chance was this! A five-hundred-mile hemisphere of utter desolation. No food; no water. And I had no weapons or instruments, save the single little paralyzer-gun which I had snatched from the deck when I recovered my senses. I was beginning to be sorry now that I had so hastily left the Seven Stars. No chance of getting back; the die was cast, here on little Asteroid-9 pitted against this resourceful, youthful astonishing Interplanetary murderer.
What was Carson's plan? Escape from the ship had been a desperate necessity for him, of course. And my memory was back to the fragments I had heard between him and Brenda. I could understand them better now! They had planned from the beginning to escape to Asteroid-9! And poor little Brenda, entangled in this criminality with her brother, had left the ship first, and met her death. Memory of the map they had had came suddenly to me. I had it in my pocket now; I tried to conjure what it had looked like. Outlines of mountains; the word Andros. Was that the name of one of the asteroid's mountain peaks? Probably it was. I cursed myself for my ignorance. The Phantom raider probably was based upon this desolate asteroid. A hide-out here, with food and water and possibly with some of the raiders' men living here. And Carson was dropping now to join them.
What chance had I against a layout like that?
But I had no choice now but hurtle downward, trying to check my descent as best I could. For a time, as I came out from under the clouds, with the dark, fantastic surface of naked, ragged little peaks no more than twenty or thirty thousand feet down, it seemed that I had been too brash; I was dropping too fast; never would I be able to check it. I would crash....
But that, too, was an error, born of my momentarily despairing thoughts. I was presently poised, some ten thousand feet up. The highest of the little peaks was no more than half that. They stood in a tumbled mass—jagged needle-spires—rocks and buttes and great round-top boulders, with ravines and gullies between them. Scene of utter, naked desolation, convulsed landscape, frozen into immobility.
And suddenly my heart was pounding with abrupt exultation. Far down, where the starlight and Earthlight bathed a little peak, I saw the speck which was the descending Carson! Just for a second the tiny outline of his bloated suit was clear against the background of a shining rock. Then he dropped into an inky shadow and was gone again.
I tried to mark the spot. A little triplet of spires, standing like sentinels above a small dark valley. Was that Andros, a landmark here? Probably it was.
I was down in perhaps another half hour, with the triplet of spires standing up against what was now a sullen sky of broken leaden clouds through which the starlight and Earthlight fitfully shone. I had landed, by all that I could judge, about half an Earth-mile from where Carson had dropped. Had he seen me coming down above him? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
With my helmet off, and with my lungs panting as they tried to adjust themselves to the weird air, I crouched for a moment in the shadow of a rock, peering, listening. There was nothing. It seemed a dead world, myself its only inhabitant—a silence so utter that my own breath, my pounding heart were roaring in my ears.