Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Imagination April 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Prison Of A Billion Years
by
C. H. Thames
Illustrated by H. W. McCauley
Adam Slade was a man who had nothing to lose by making abreak for it. The trouble was, he knew that no one had everescaped from the—
dam Slade crushed the guard's skull with a two foot length of ironpipe. No one ever knew where Slade got the iron pipe, but it did notseem so important.
The guard was dead. That was important.
And Slade was on the loose. With a hostage.
That was even more important.
The hostage's name was Marcia Lawrence. She was twenty-two years oldand pretty and scared half out of her wits. She was, before she becamea hostage, a reporter for Interplanetary Video. She had been grantedthe final pre-execution interview with Adam Slade and she had lookedforward to it a long time but it had not worked out as planned.
It had not worked out as planned because Slade, only hours from theexecution chamber with absolutely nothing to lose, had splattered theguard's brains around the inside of his cell and marched outside witha frightened Marcia Lawrence.
Outside. Outside the cell block while other condemned prisoners roaredand shouted and banged tin cups on bars and metal walls andjudas-hole-grills. Outside the prison compound and across thedome-enclosed city which served the prison.
Then outside the dome.
Outside the dome there was rock. Rock only, twisted and convoluted andthrusting and gigantic like monoliths of a race of giants. Rock aloneunder the awesome gray sky. Steaming rock, for some of the terrestrialwaters were still trapped at great depths. And the sea far off,booming against rocky headlands, hissing tidally and slowly, in anage-long process, pulverizing the rock. The sea far off, a clean sea,not sea-smelling sea, a sea whose waters must evaporate countlesstimes and be borne up over the naked rocks in vapor and clouds andcome down in pelting, endless rain and rush across the rock, frothingand steaming—a sea which must do this countless times in the eons tocome, and would do it, to bring salinity to its own waters.
"It kind of scares the hell out of you, doesn't it?" Adam Slade said.He was a big man with a thick neck and heavy, sleepy-looking eyes anda blue beard-shadow on his stubborn jaw. He said those words as heclimbed out of the prison tank with Marcia Lawrence. The tank's metalwas still warm from over-heated travel.
"I didn't think anything would scare you," Marcia Lawrence said. Shehad conquered her initial terror in the five hours of clanking tankflight from the prison. They had come a great many miles from theprison dome, paralleling the edge of the saltless sea and thenfinally, when their fuel was almost gone, clanking and rattling downtoward the sea. She was a newspaperwoman, that above all now. She mustnot be afraid. She had a story here. A story.
"Get moving," Adam Slade said.