"You'll be going back on the survey ship, Bart. That way, you'll have a long voyage in the brig to meditate on your sins. But on Earth, you'll have Rose. You're a married man there, with a wife and child. Rose still loves you, Bart. When you steal something, it stays stolen. I'm not going back, so you'll get Rose after all."
Roper laughed coldly. "That's what I meant about your being smarter than I am. You always come out ahead."
Torry's eyes followed a moving mirage to a notch high on the walls of the gully. The glitter of cold metal was not illusion. Tharol Sen held a gun on him, unwaveringly.
"You can come out now," Torry said to her. "It's all over."
Tharol Sen lowered her gun and walked unsteadily toward them.
"Why didn't you shoot?" Roper stormed at her angrily. "You could have killed him before he pulled the trigger."
Inside her face plate. Torry could see her eyes dim with hot tears.
"Yes, I could have," she said brokenly. "But maybe I've seen enough mirages to recognize one...."
Many Martian hours later, three people watched the survey ship blast off from Triton. Before the ship left, Grannar had been taken aboard and removed from his spacesuit long enough for drugs to be administered and his legs set and splinted. Now, with painkilling narcotics deadening him, the policeman was scarcely aware of the departing ship with his prisoner aboard, consigned bodily to Earth and its clinic for incurable criminals. Grannar had relaxed into a dope-daydream of a comfortable future on Earth as a plankton farmer, with nothing to do but read minifilm detective stories.