Slipping, skidding, stumbling in his haste, he raced to the nearest port, flung open the control-bar, threw himself into the small, tear-shaped vehicle lying there. There were regulations demanding that air, food, water supplies be ascertained before flight in one of these was attempted. But there was no time for such nonsense now. Each second seemed an hour as Mallory warmed the hypatomic motors of the skiff, rammed the button that opened the Libra's outer shell, struck another that catapulted the safety-rocket away from its parent craft.
Then the dark of the womblike casing was gone, and he was blasting, under his own power, through space illumined with the candle-gleams of a trillion galactic motes. He set his range-finder and attractor—but even as their needles found their objective, his searching eyes located it. A tiny, silvery gleam against the tawny night ahead—a gleam from the stern of which flared burst upon flaming burst of superheated light.
The rockets of Smith's skiff, hell-bent for Io!
Minutes had been precious! Vitally so. Already the little craft was countless thousands of miles before him. It was a wide margin that separated him; and in that margin lay the difference between freedom and peonage for forty thousand Earth-men, millions of Ionians, the difference between life and death for the girl Smith had kidnaped, the difference between victory and defeat for the Solar Patrolmen.
There was only one way to catch Smith. Recognizing the fact, Dan Mallory bit his lip, set his jaw stubbornly. Acceleration! Acceleration great enough to fling him across the yawning void, enable him to snare his quarry in tensiles....
And he was not strapped! No safety corset to hold tight the straining cords of his viscera, no yards of gauze padding to keep his wracked body from literally flinging itself to shreds. No—
He glanced about him hurriedly. There were piles of cushions, soft, plump, airy, scattered about the metallic cockpit. He jammed a dozen of these behind him, under him, about him. There was an oxy-helmet in its container beside him; he thrust this over his head. Its rubberoid halter settled about his chest, his shoulders. At least his straining eyes would not bulge from their sockets; by adjustment—if he could raise a hand—he could compensate accelerative force with pressure.
He drew a deep breath. Then, recklessly, wrenched the dial of the motor to full acceleration!
It was as though ten thousand fiery demons tore at his body with claws of flame. A weight, massive, imponderable, kicked the breath out of his lungs, forced it from his gaping mouth and flared nostrils into the helmet he wore. He gulped and strangled, fighting to draw into a shrunken chest a breach of fleeing life. One hand moved—or tried to—to his throat in an instinctive gesture of distress. The hand moved a half inch from his knee, flung itself back into his stomach like a leaden weight.