Her head turned, and the face that looked up at him was marked by deep, thoughtful lines. She said, "How do you feel?"
He shrugged. "A little shaky, but death seems remote and not applicable to me."
"It's more than that," Was the earnest reply. "The nervous system of a slan is an almost impregnable fortress. It cannot really be touched by insanity or 'nerves' or fear. When we kill, it is because of policy arrived at through logic. When death approaches our personal lives, we accept the situation, fight to the last in the hope of an unpredictable factor turning up to save us, and finally, reluctantly, give up the ghost, conscious that we have not lived in vain."
He stared at her curiously, his mind projecting against hers, feeling of the gentle pulsing of overtones, the strange half friendliness that was in her voice and over-flowed from her mind. His eyes narrowed. What purpose was forming in her alert, sensitive, unsentimental brain? She went on:
"Jommy Cross, it may surprise you to know that I have come to believe your story, and that you are not only what you say you are, but that you actually hold the ideals you have professed. You are the first true slan I have ever met and, for the first time in my life, I have a sense of tension eased, as if, after all these centuries, the deadly darkness is lifting. If you escape our guns, I beg you to keep your ideals as you grow older, and please don't betray us. Don't become a tool of creatures who have used only murder and destruction for so many, many years. You have been in my mind, and you know that I have not lied to you about them. Whatever the logic of their philosophy, it's wrong because it's inhuman. It must be wrong because its result has been unending misery."
If he escaped! So that was it! If he escaped, they would be dependent on his good will, and she was playing that angle now for all she was worth.
"But remember one thing," Joanna Hillory went on; "you can expect no help from us. We must, in the name of security, consider you as an enemy. Too much depends upon it, the fate of too many people is involved. So do not expect at some future date to obtain mercy, Jommy Cross, because of what I have said or because you have released me. Do not come into our midst, because, I warn you, it means swift death.
"You see, we credit true slans with superior intelligence, or rather, superior development of intelligence, owing to their mind-reading ability. There is no cunning of which we would not believe them capable, no ruthlessness they have not already equaled. A plan requiring thirty or a hundred years to mature is not beyond them. Therefore, even though I believe what you have told me, the uncertainty of how you may develop as you grow older would make me kill you this instant were it in my power. Do not ever test our good will. It is suspicion, not tolerance, that rules us. But now, good-by and, paradoxical as this may sound, good luck!"
He watched her as she walked lightly, swiftly, into the darkness that lay heavily on the valley to the west, the way that led to the city – his way, also. Her form became a shadow in the clinging mist of night. She was gone over a hill. Swiftly, he closed the door, rushed into the storeroom and snatched a couple of space suits from the wall. The old woman babbled in feeble protest as he stuffed her forcibly into one of them. He crowded into his own as he scrambled into the control room.
He closed the door on the sobering leer that twisted Granny's face behind the transparent headpiece, and in a second was sitting tensely staring into the "sky" visiplate. His fingers reached for the activator of the antigravity plates; and then came the hesitation, the doubt that had been growing in him each second that brought the inexorable moment of action nearer. Was it possible that his simple plan would actually work?
Jommy Cross could see the ships, little dark spots in the sky above him. The sun was shining up there, a spray of brilliance that picked out the tiny torpedo shapes like so many fly spots on an immense blue ceiling. The clouds and the haze of the valley were clearing with magical speed, and if the clarity with which he could see them through his visiplates was any criterion, then even the weather was against him. He was still in the shadows of this sweet, clean little valley, but in a few minutes now the very perfection of the day would begin to damage his chances of escape.
His brain was so tensely concentrated that for a moment the distorted thought that flowed into his mind seemed to come from himself:
"... needn't worry. Old Granny'll get rid of the slan. Get some make-up and change her face. What's the good of having been an actress if you can't change your looks? Granny'll make a white, lovely body like she used to have, and change this old face. Ugh!"
She seemed to spit in convulsions at the thought of her face, and Jommy Cross eased the picture out of his mind. But her words remained with him. His parents had used false hair, but the necessary mutilation of natural hair and the constant recutting had proved very unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, true slans must be doing it all the time, and now that he was old enough to be able to make a reasonably efficient job of it, with Granny's help and experience it might be the answer.
Strangely, now that a plan for the future had come, his hesitation vanished. Light as a dust mote, the ship fell away from Earth, and then jerked into enormous speed as the rockets kicked into life. Five minutes to accelerate and decelerate, the slan commander had said. Jommy Cross smiled grimly. He wasn't going to decelerate. At undiminished speed, he dived for the river that made a wide black swath at the outskirts of the city, the city he had picked because the river was there. At the very last moment he put on full deceleration.
And at that final moment, when it was already too late, the confidence of the slan commanders must have been shaken. They forgot their reluctance to use their guns and show their ships so near a human city. They swooped like great birds of prey; fire sparkled from all seven cruisers... Jommy Cross pulled gently on the wire that pressed the trigger on his own weapon, mounted in the vise at the nose of the ship.
From outside, a violent blow added speed to the three-hundred-miles-an-hour clip of his machine. But he scarcely noticed it, the only effect of the enemy fire. His attention was concentrated on his own weapon. As he pulled the wire there was a flare of white. Instantly a two-foot circle in the thick nose of the craft vanished. The white, malignant ray leaped forth fanwise, dissolving the water of the river in front of the torpedo-shaped craft, and into the tunnel thus created slid the spaceship, decelerating at full, frightful blast of the forward tubes.
The visiplates went black with the water above and the water below, then blacker as the water ended and the inconceivable ferocity of the atom smasher bored on irresistibly into the ground beyond, deeper, deeper.
It was like flying through air, only there was no resistance except the pressure of rocket blasts. The atoms of earth, broken into their component elements, instantly lost their mathematically unreal solidity and assumed their actuality of a space tenuously occupied by matter. Ten million million years of built-up cohesion collapsed into the lowest state of primeval matter.
With rigid gaze, Jommy Cross stared at the second hand of his watch: ten, twenty, thirty... one minute. He began to ease the nose of the ship upward, but the enormous pressure of deceleration made no physical easing possible. It was thirty seconds before he cut the number of rocket blasts and the end was in sight.
After two minutes and twenty seconds of underground flight the ship stopped. He must be near the center of the city, and there was approximately eight miles of tunnel behind him, into which water would be pouring from the tortured river. The water would close up the hole, but the frustrated tendrilless slans would need no interpreter to tell them what had happened. Besides, their instruments would this very second be pointing directly at the location of his ship.