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"Got to get you back to the s.h.i.+p. No time to talk. Hurry."
"But you can't walk like that. You're badly hurt. I'll bring help."
"... dangerous. I'll take you."
He'd take her, flirting with death. Because, for all he knew, his time on Pluto, objectively, had already totalled forty-eight hours. If it did, he would never live to get off Pluto. Once his thirty days were up, he would die. Still, there might be danger from other animals between the scout-s.h.i.+p and _Mozart's Lady_, and he couldn't let the girl go back alone. It was almost ludicrous, since she had to help him to his feet.
He staggered along with her, knowing he would never make it to _Mozart's Lady_ and back in time. But if he left her, she was probably doomed too.
He'd sacrifice his life for hers....
They went a hundred yards, Mayhem gripping the blaster and advancing by sheer effort of will. Then he smiled, and began to laugh. Jane thought he was hysterical with pain. But he said: "We're a pair of bright ones.
The scout-s.h.i.+p."
Inside, it was very small. They had to lie very close to each other, but they made it. They reached _Mozart's Lady_.
Mayhem didn't wait to say good-bye. With what strength remained to him, he almost flung the girl from the scout-s.h.i.+p. The pain in his shoulder was very bad, but that wasn't what worried him. What worried him was the roaring in his ears, the vertigo, the mental confusion as his _elan_ drifted, its thirty days up, toward death.
He saw the girl enter _Mozart's Lady_. He blasted off, and when the s.p.a.ce-bound coffin pierced Pluto's heavyside layer, he called the Hub.
The voice answered him as if it were mere miles away, and not halfway across a galaxy: "Good Lord, man. You had us worried! You have about ten seconds. Ten seconds more and you would have been dead."
Mayhem was too tired to care. Then he felt a wrenching pain, and all at once his _elan_ floated, serene, peaceful, in limbo. He had been plucked from the dying body barely in time, to fight mankind's lone battle against the stars again, wherever he was needed ... out beyond Pluto.
Forever? It wasn't impossible.
