"She did it! She killed him and escaped!"
"No!" roared Mallory. "Smith did it! The man we should have suspected all the time; the man who admitted his guilt, but I was too blind to see it. Kreuther's spy. The renegade space officer—Captain, did you feel that?"
His space-trained senses had felt the swift, tiny moment of jarring repercussion that meant only one thing—that from one of the escape ports a life-skiff, an auxiliary safety rocket, had slipped from its base on the Libra, taken off into space!
"He's escaping! He's kidnaped her and taken off in a life-skiff. Bud! Take over! I'm lifting gravs!"
And for the first time in his career as an officer of the SSP, Lieutenant Daniel Mallory violated, deliberately, a rule of the Space Patrol handbook. He rammed the Libra's controls into the robot hands of the Iron Mike, and abandoned his post in mid-flight!
It was not that he considered himself more capable than his captain or the second mate. His move was dominated by only one thing, the urgent need for haste. Safety rockets are, as everyone knows, blindingly fast. Much faster than the heavier, sturdier, cruising vessels that bear them like so many unfledged wallabies in a pouch. Give Smith a flying start and he would never be apprehended. And he, Dan Mallory, was much nearer a life-skiff port than the other officers up in the loft of the radio turret.