She looked wildly about, then stared at him. "I thought you had abandoned me. Did your conscience get the better of you?"
The hardness of her voice shocked him. He looked at her in pained surprise. "I thought you were dead. I saw the flickering of the light from the pool when you came out of it. I came back then only because I couldn't believe you had really died."
"Of course. You couldn't really know, could you?" Abruptly she was crying. He sat down and took her hand.
"There is no one else in the System who would not have been glad to leave Firebird there forever," she said.
Nathan made no reply. He could not comprehend her strangeness. But for the moment she was no longer the fearless Firebird. She was a little girl, lonely and lost.
VI
Mars was wholesome in death before the coming of the spacemen. Now it was the refuse heap of the Solar System.
There was Heliopolis, of course, the great, shining, chrome-plated space port where vessels from all parts of the System touched for refueling and recreation of the passengers. Recreation that was not legal on any of the other planets.
The permanent population of Heliopolis was three fourths confidence men. The other fourth was made up of fugitives from penal colonies and thieves and murderers whose crimes had not caught up with them.