t? On Pluto Mayhem would slow down. Once he reached Pluto's normal
time rate it might take him, say, ten minutes to run--top-speed--from
point A to point B, fifteen yards apart. Subjectively, a split-second of
time would have gone by in that period.

Two days would seem like less than an hour, and Mayhem would have no way
of judging how much less.

If he didn't get off Pluto in two days he would die.

If he didn't land, House Bartock, growing desperate and trying to scare
him off or trying to keep control of the hundred girls while he made a
desperate and probably futile attempt to repair the damaged _Mozart's
Lady_, might become violent.

Mayhem called Neptune, and said: "Bartock crash-landed on Pluto,
geographical coordinates north latitude thirty-three degrees four
minutes, west longitude eighteen degrees even. I'm going down. That's
all."

He didn't wait for an answer.

He brought the space-bound coffin down a scant three miles from
_Mozart's Lady_. Here, though, the tundra of Pluto was buckled and
convoluted, so that two low jagged ranges of snow-clad hills separated
the ships.

Again Mayhem didn't wait. He went outside, took a breath of
near-freezing air, and stalked up the first range of hills. He carried a
blaster buckled to his belt.

* * * * *

When he saw the scout-ship come down, Bartock didn't wait either. He
might have waited had he known anything about what Pluto did to the
time-sense. But he did not know. He only knew, after a quick inspection,
that the controls of _Mozart's Lady_ had been so badly damaged that
repair was impossible.

He knew too that the scout-ship had reported his whereabouts. He had, on
regaining consciousness, been in time to intercept the radio message.
True, it would take any other Neptune-stationed ship close to two weeks
to reach Pluto, so Bartock had some temporal leeway. But obviously
whoever was pursuing him in the one-man ship had not come down just to
sit and wait. He was out there in the snow somewhere. Well, Bartock
would go out too, would somehow manage to elude his pursuer, to get
behind him, reach the scout-ship and blast off in it. And, in the event
that anything went wrong, he would have a hostage.

He went arearships to select one.

Went with his desperation shackled by an iron nerve.

And a blaster in his hand.

"... very lucky," Matilda Moriarity was saying, trying to keep the
despair from her voice. "We have some c