"They say she shot his head plumb off," said the old codger.
"Yep, she certainly mowed him down."
The sourdough lifted a bony finger toward Ricker's brief case. "I noticed th' tag on yer kit there," he ventured. "Says th' Planetary Times. Be you one o' them telenews fellows?"
Ricker grinned. "Shore am, podner," he said.
"Gonna write about this here murderess arriving on Pluto?"
Ricker nodded good-humoredly. "That's my job."
Slowly a faint siren hum penetrated the cabin, not unlike the sound of a power plant. A power plant it was too, the ship digging in full blast as it skirted the pull of Neptune. Ricker turned away from his garrulous neighbor, saw the sea-tinted planet had doubled in size. It was a perfect sphere, without a mark on its surface, a ring of solid hydrogen and helium. A worthless world, thought Ricker; worthless as was half the universe—because the woman in the seat up front had killed a man!
"Molly Borden—Benjamin Adison ..." the sourdough mused, apparently still awed by such infamous company.
"Yep," said Ricker, remembering a line from his last story: "In the flash of a pistol those names became linked forever...." It was odd, he reflected. One was a woman nobody at the trial had ever seen before, the other was a man whose name echoed throughout the spaceways. Benjamin Adison was to stellar travel what Wright had been to terrestrial aviation and in his sixtieth year when, at the completion of his work on planet-warming, he had suddenly become corpus delicti in the perfect telenews story. A stolen secret, a mysterious woman, a person high in the government—it had all the angles. Then Senator Trexel was acquitted, Molly Borden confessed. Now she was journeying to a life sentence on the penal planet.
"Too bad she burned Adison's plans when they trapped her." It was Ricker's self-appointed traveling companion again.