"Hush!" pleaded Nadia in agony.
"Look what it would mean. We'd be condemned to the Lunar Corrective Colony."
She gripped his arm desperately. "But I'm not! I'm not!" She regained her composure with an effort and went on in a low bitter tone, "I have been proscribed! Does that answer your questions? I killed a man. He was a high official of Tri-World. The corporation put a price on my head."
The Terran government was humanitarian. Capital punishment had been abolished along with a score of other institutions such as marriage, divorce and the family.
But the big corporations were the real rulers. Feudal in character, they maintained their power by purges that would have made the bloody twentieth century snow white by comparison. Their property, their officials were inviolate. Their law was a tooth for a tooth, and their gunmen hung on the trail of an offender whom they had proscribed until they caught up with him.
If the girl was telling the truth, she was as good as dead. Sooner or later, ten—twenty years, it made no difference, the agents of Tri-World would catch up with her.
"Why did you kill him?"
"He—he...." She glanced at the deck, flushed faintly.
"Nonsense," said Gavin. "People don't get killed for that any more. Why did you kill him?"
She looked at him, startled. "He caught me drawing a plan of Tri-World's magnetic ore-loader. It was a corporation secret. I was just a kid, a cadet aboard the Saturn. I—I was offered a lot of money for the plans...." She halted lamely.