"I've been keeping this for you!" Jenks shrilled. "I'll just diminish the population of Pluto by thirty-three and one-third percent!"
"Hold it!" bellowed Wofforth.
He was too late. A stream of bullets chattered through Corbett's body, folding him over and ripping through the paper-thin wall of the tent. Air whistled out; the tent began to collapse.
Jenks, pinned under Corbett's body, was squealing like a pig. "Lieutenant, help me—!"
Wofforth saw in an instant that the wall could not be patched in time; the bullets had torn loose an irregular strip, pressure had done the rest: even now, the tent was only a few seconds away from complete collapse. As he stumbled across the floor toward the spacesuits, his heart was laboring and his chest straining for breath. Spots swam in front of his eyes. He found the topmost spacesuit by touch, and fumbled for the helmet. The tent drifted down on his head in soft, murderous folds. He opened the valve, shoved his face into the helmet, and gulped precious oxygen. His dulled awareness brightened again, momentarily; but he knew he was still a dead man unless he could get into the suit before pressure fell completely. Numbed fingers plucked at the suit opening. Somehow he got the awkward garment over his legs, closed and locked the torso, pulled down the helmet....
He was lying in darkness, with a low, steady hiss of oxygen in his ears. He rolled over weakly, got to his feet. He turned on his helmet light. He was propping up a gray cave of metal foil, that fell in stiff creases all around him. At his feet were the bodies of Jenks and Corbett. Both were dead.
After a while, clumsily, painfully, he dragged the two corpses free of the tent. He found the heater and thawed a hole in the frozen surface, big enough for both. He tumbled them in, then undercut the edges of the hole with the heater, so that chunks fell in and covered them. While he watched, the cloud of vapor he had made began to settle, slowly congealing on the broken surface and blurring it over again. In a year, there would be no mark here to show that the surface had been disturbed. In a thousand years, it would still be the same.
In the first ray of dawn he flung all supplies from the sled except the fuel containers. He checked the engine, and started it.
Into his belt-bag he thrust the log book. Nothing else went aboard the sled—no food, no water container, no tools, instruments or oxygen tanks. The tent he left lying there, with all that had been carried inside the night before.
As the sun rose clear of the distant rim of the plain to eastward, he rigged a line to the steering boom, then lashed himself securely within reach of the engine. Steering by the taut line, he started westward, slowly at first, then faster. It was as he had hoped. The lightened sled attained and held a greater speed than on any previous day.