"Then we can go? Go now?" she asked eagerly, as Hugh Neils released her. "The crew is asleep? You were able to arrange it?"
The young engineer looked down at her, his thin face a pale blur in the darkness.
"In five minutes, just five minutes, Nanlo, my own," he whispered. "I left the guard half an hour ago, drinking molkai into which I put a sleeping powder. Give him five more minutes to fall asleep, then we can go to the ship unseen, unchecked. Until then, we can wait here in the garden."
He led her toward the trilling fountain and they sat down upon a bench before it, of rare Callisto crystal. They still were in darkness, but the flame-like Jupiter light touched the tops of the neklo trees above them with a ruddy light which brought faint glimmerings from the radioactive leaves.
Hugh Neils was a recent college graduate whom Negu Mah had hired as an assistant supervisor in the refining mills on Callisto, where the precious uranium 235 was separated from the ordinary metal. It was not a desirable job, but the best Hugh Neils could get. His college record of reckless scrapes and entanglements with women had been against him. Indeed, this position had only come to him because his home was in the same section as Nanlo's, and Negu Mah had thought that perhaps his company on occasion would help alleviate Nanlo's restlessness.
It had—but to an extent Negu Mah had not foreseen.
"In less than a quarter of an hour, Nanlo my darling," Hugh Neils whispered now, "we'll be gone from here, and you'll belong only to me. We'll leave this infernal barren satellite to spin itself dizzy out here in no place. We'll leave that humpty-dumpty husband of yours and his hypocritical good-nature to whistle for his wife and his ship. We won't care. We'll be together, always together from now on, and he'll never see us again."
Nanlo leaned against his shoulder, the prospect that he painted seemed very sweet to her.
"You're sure you can manage the ship alone?" she asked. "But of course, I can help, a little anyway. You can teach me."
"Of course," Hugh Neils answered confidently, and bent to kiss her again. "I've been studying her for a week, asking questions, making friends with the crew. I can handle her one-handed. We'll take off and circle Jupiter first. They may think we landed on the other side, in the Outlaw Crevice. Or they may figure that we went on to Saturn, and will hide somewhere in the system there.