Mallory's grin tightened. He cut motors. His tensile beam would contract like a rubber band, drawing the two ships together. Smith, feeling that beam upon him, unable to sheer it off, would not be able to turn a lethal radiation upon him now. For the tensile beam was a perfect conduction ray. To destroy one ship meant to destroy both.
There was a groan behind him. Shocked, he turned. From the storage bin, bleeding from nose, ears, mouth, body twisted as though wrung through some gigantic mangler, crawled the missing jewel thief—Albert Lemming!
Mallory choked, sickened. "Lord, man! How did you get aboard here? Why—"
Liquid breath gurgled in Lemming's throat. Glaze filmed his eyeballs. "Tried to—" he panted, "—stow away. Wilmot dead—knew suspect me—hid—"
His head fell forward to the floor. Dan fingered his pulse, found there not the feeblest stir of life. Lemming, fleeing the dreaded breath of suspicion, had lost the more important breath of life. The miracle was that he had survived, even so long, the tremendous acceleration that had taxed all Mallory's space-trained, protected faculties.
And the two space-skiffs closed inexorably the gap between them. Mallory's quick brain leaped to the final problem. But before he could solve it, the small skiff audio burst into speech.
"Well done, whoever you are!" said the voice from the other skiff. "But you realize it won't do you any good?"
Mallory rasped, "I'm coming alongside in a minute, Smith. Stand by to surrender peaceably, or—"
"Or?" mocked the ex-space officer. "So it's you, Lieutenant? I might have guessed it. Your valor is exceeded only by your lack of foresight. I repeat, your hectic pursuit has done you no good."