It was an endless belt of stranded travelers robbing and stranding other travelers, who then had to rob and strand still others, and so on and on....
Cassal didn't have a chance of catching up with Murra Foray. She had used the time—and Dimanche—to create her own identification tab and escape. She was going back to Kettikat, home of the Huntners, must already be light-years away.
Or was she? The signs on the Bureau had just been changed. Perhaps the ship was still in the spaceport, or cruising along below the speed of light. He shrugged defeatedly. It would do him no good; he could never get on board.
He got up suddenly on one elbow. He couldn't, but Manche could! Unlike his old instrument, it could operate at tremendous distances, its power no longer dependent only on his limited nervous energy.
With calculated fury, he let Manche strike out into space.
"There you are!" exclaimed Murra Foray. "I thought you could do it."
"Did you?" he asked coldly. "Where are you now?"
"Leaving the atmosphere, if you can call the stuff around this planet an atmosphere."
"It's not the atmosphere that's bad," he said as nastily as he could. "It's the philanthropy."