"As long as you're with me I figure they might follow, but they won't rush me. They might even send over a 'copter, but it won't try anything. Not with you here. Desperate? I'm not desperate, and don't you forget it. Desperate you don't think straight. Once is all they can execute me. I stayed behind, they'd of done it. If they catch me, they'll do it. What's the difference?"

"You said you had a plan."

hey reached the edge of a thrusting headland, an enormous beak-shaped cliff of beetling black rock which leaned out over the young, still saltless ocean. Slade paced back and forth quickly, with a powerful leonine grace, until he found a fault in the rock. The fault tumbled jaggedly, steeply down almost to the edge of the sea.

"Down there," Slade said. "We'll follow the sea coast back to the prison."

"Back?" Marcia said in disbelief.

"Hell yes, back. You said it yourself. There's no food out here. Since there ain't no life, of course there's no food. Oh, it's a great place for a prison, all right. Whoever thought of it ought to win a prize. A prison—a billion years in the past. What's the word?"

"Archaeozoic," she supplied.

"Yeah, archaeozoic. An archaeozoic prison. You can escape to your heart's content, but what the hell's the difference. There's no life back here, not yet. The Earth's just a baby. So you escape—and you starve to death. It makes every maximum security jail before this one look like a kid's piggy bank."

"There hasn't ever been an escape," Marcia said hopefully as they made their way down to the sea, she in front and Slade behind her with the M-gun.

"There ain't never been a hostage before."

"No-o."

"There's a hostage now."

Marcia Lawrence took a deep breath and asked suddenly, "Are you going to kill me?"

"Hell, I don't know. I got no reason to—unless you make me. We're going back there. We're double-tracking along the beach, get me? Back to the prison dome."

"But—"

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