The two-hour flight was almost pleasant. The stars over our speeding helicar glittered down like far, frosty eyes and the gritty red ocean of desert under us lost its harshness and took on a magic pattern of soft, shifting shadows. Phobos paced us across the black night sky like a swift silver morning-star, and the little gray jackals crept out of their dens and howled at her with all the pent-up loneliness of a million, million years.
Cheryl shivered at their keening, and the thought that she could be as skittish as other women gave me a little jolt of surprise.
"Mournful little beggars, aren't they?" I said. "I wonder what they'd think of Earth, with its big yellow moon all night in the sky?"
Cheryl didn't answer, but it seemed to me that she thawed out a little. It was almost cozy in the helicar after that until the dusty neon haze of Areopolis ballooned up out of the desert.
IV
We came in low to avoid any radar net the port patrol might have up, and entered the sleeping city above the shadowy warrens of the native district.
"You'll have to be careful," Cheryl warned. "And quick. Shanig's men will be watching the Argonaut, and the police won't have forgotten you so soon."
"I'll be careful," I said, knowing better than she the sort of odds Shanig would favor. "The next question is where do I find you after I drag that case of arrested development out of there?"
She gave me an address. "I took a room there as soon as I realized that Shanig was after me. I doubt that he's been able to trace me so soon."