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The big wheels bent and crushed the canal sage, leaving a double trail. The canal sage brought with it the comforting feeling of surface life once more. This feeling, for no reason that he could have determined consciously, released Nuwell's tongue. "Maya," he said, in a voice that betrayed determination behind its mildness, "I don't see any real reason for waiting.
It had not seemed too great a feat to her to hold Dark captive with her disguised heatgun when she was anticipating Nuwell's arrival within hours. But suddenly she felt like a hunter who has snared a lion in a rabbit trap. "Maya, are you there?" demanded Nuwell querulously. "We'll spell each other at the wheel and drive up without stopping, but it will still take two and a half days to get there."
There had been three of them during the morning, two arriving by groundcar and one by copter, at three different chateaus. She had driven to each one and circumspectly inspected the new guest, but none had been anyone she recognized from the Childress Barber College. In a way, she wished she had yielded to Nuwell's importunities. There was much more of interest to do in Mars City.
Her flesh ached from yesterday's beating, and she was sick at heart at the revelation of Nuwell's essential brutality and callousness. She had thought him a sensitive and intelligent man, and she had admired him for this even after some of his exhibitions of childish temper had disillusioned her as to the glowing nobility which she had at first attributed to him.
She looked at it with mild curiosity as it rolled into a corner. She hadn't done that for a long time, not since she suppressed it because of Nuwell's hatred of witchcraft. It was telekinesis. She had had the power since she was a child. It seemed that she remembered using it often, and in rather startling ways, when she was a small child with the Martians.
As soon as she answered it, her ears were assailed by Nuwell's agonized voice. "Maya, I can't get up there tonight!" he said. "There aren't any jets here, and these idiots refuse to bring one in from Hesperidum or Cynia for me to use. I'll have to come up by groundcar." Maya sat silent, stunned.
From the time she saw Dark Kensington die until Nuwell's arrival at the Chateau Nectaris a day later, Maya remained in her room, half in shock, half in an agony of sorrow and remorse. She was so exhausted by her ordeal that she did sleep, but it was fitfully and without genuine rest. She had her meals sent up to her room, and ate automatically, not tasting the food.
Maya Cara Nome, his colleague in this mission to which he had addressed himself, was a silent companion. Nuwell's liquid brown eyes, insistent upon their visual clarity, saw the red sand as the blowing surface of unliving solidity. Only clarity was admitted to Nuwell, and the only living clarity was man and beast and vegetation, spotted in the dome cities and dome farms of the lowlands.
It was a child-sized creature, naked, grotesquely barrel-chested and teetering on thin, twisted legs. Its hairless head was skull-like, with gaping mouth and huge, round eyes. Maya gasped, profoundly shocked. The little creature looked more like a miniature Martian native than a human, but the Martians themselves were not so distorted. She saw her own shock reflected in Nuwell's face.
"Why by copter?" asked Maya. "Groundcar is faster." For the first time, Nuwell's face broke into a genuine smile, and his ordinary charming self shone through. "Because," he replied drolly, "I've just made that trip by groundcar, and every bone in my body aches. It may be slower, but I want to go back by air, where there aren't as many bumps!" Maya was able to laugh at this.
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