"Damn him!" Lattimer snarled. "At the very least Fane would know how to use some of these machines after six months here. He'd know how to travel fast...."
Again, against the possibility of their conversation being overheard they were speaking directly by contact-transmitted sound.
"Keep down and tune in on camp," Rick said. "We can listen, anyway."
They heard strange noises. And then Nostrand's voice saying: "... We're under attack. A dozen war-robots. Parties afield please don't answer if there is danger of giving away your positions by radio-direction finder.... Ship already disabled...."
"It _must_ be Fane doing it," young Finden snarled.
"Maybe. Not necessarily," Lattimer answered. "The question is, what do we do? Try to get back to camp on foot?"
Rick was younger and less experienced than the middle aged Lattimer but he felt the force of leadership coming over him. Most of it, perhaps, was fury, bringing the drive out in him--and bringing out an idea.
"We'd be of small use in camp," he said, "even if we could get there. Come on--crawl!..."
Rick had spied another Martian corpse, half-buried in a blanket of frozen air and frost a little way down the ditch. They reached it, and Rick ripped open the thin, rubberlike integument that had served its kind as space armor. Among its weird equipment Rick found a pouch held close to its hardened flesh. He drew out a parchment.
"Should have thought of this before," he growled. "In war they carried maps--Martians and Xians alike. Now let's see. What looks important on the dark hemisphere? Something that a guy like Fane would go for. If that's the way it is...."
The three men huddled together, squinting at the stiffened parchment in the dim light of the solar corona. Dark lines showed highways passing between jagged markings that must be mountain ranges. Rick coordinated what he knew of Mercury from astronomical photographs taken at the great observatory on the moon, with what he saw on the map, and thus found out where he and his companions were.
His attention was drawn inevitably to a great golden circle on the parchment. All roads led to it.
"No matter how you stack it, that must be the place we want to reach," Rick said. "But it's four thousand miles away."