hey reached the edge of a thrusting headland, an enormous beak-shaped cliff of beetling black rock which leaned out over the young, still saltless ocean. Slade paced back and forth quickly, with a powerful leonine grace, until he found a fault in the rock. The fault tumbled jaggedly, steeply down almost to the edge of the sea.
"Down there," Slade said. "We'll follow the sea coast back to the prison."
"Back?" Marcia said in disbelief.
"Hell yes, back. You said it yourself. There's no food out here. Since there ain't no life, of course there's no food. Oh, it's a great place for a prison, all right. Whoever thought of it ought to win a prize. A prison—a billion years in the past. What's the word?"
"Archaeozoic," she supplied.
"Yeah, archaeozoic. An archaeozoic prison. You can escape to your heart's content, but what the hell's the difference. There's no life back here, not yet. The Earth's just a baby. So you escape—and you starve to death. It makes every maximum security jail before this one look like a kid's piggy bank."
"There hasn't ever been an escape," Marcia said hopefully as they made their way down to the sea, she in front and Slade behind her with the M-gun.
"There ain't never been a hostage before."
"No-o."