Hand on the controls, Rufus faltered, looking back at the tumbled maze of glinty hair.
"Whoever told you that?" he demanded, feeling poignantly sorry for her for the first time. Up until the present instant, he had considered her impersonally, rather as a key or possible solution for his own troubles. It made him aware of the tremendous risks he was taking with her life. Yet it was too late to back out now.
Under his guidance, the space-flyer lurched up at the sky, hurled itself through the thinning blue stratosphere and smoked a fast trail for the outer depths of space.
Strange, or was it?—that up till now he had thought only of that final memory of his gaunt death-beckoned father, of the promise he had made looking into the stern exactness of fading eyes.
When young Rufus swore he would keep the Thallin Starways going, would preserve that proud tradition that went back to former times when the first gallant rocket-ships bellowed like fire-breathing monsters and hurtled fearlessly into the void, he had meant every word of it.
His feelings changed. Again the girl was only a pawn. Everything else had failed. He had seized upon her and the sickness that lay prey to her body as a means toward an end. He felt that there was a good chance of her being cured when exposed to the healing rays of the void. He was gambling not only her life, but his own as well. For if he failed in his mission the Space Police would hound him to an eventual ignoble end.
In the visor screens, earth was falling away swiftly. As he watched a scattering of dots appeared, drifted slowly across the face of the globe, into space. Police craft, of course.
The girl's pale face was watching and he knew that she also was aware of the pursuit. To those who followed their space-ship could be but a dwindling mote that floated out of place in the pattern of encircling stars.
Yet they had him! He read that conviction deep in her listless eyes. The jaws of a gigantic trap were closing down about him in space. With the superior speed of the Marshall gravity-impelled speedsters, overhauling was certain, and then it would be a mere matter of clamping him in magnetic grapples and making up a forced boarding party in space toggings.
He pushed the controls down, built the discharge blasts to their limit, and mopped sweat from his brow.