CHAPTER II

TWO LIVES ARE GAMBLED

Staggering toward his desk, Keith Randolph Marshall began to jab at buttons affixed on its top. When servants appeared, he began screaming orders to pursue and apprehend the kidnapper.

Almost unable to breathe from sheer horror, he slumped at a window and gazed into a courtyard below. The big man was springing lightly across the lawn, and the puny wisp of the girl looked a light burden in his massive arms. A last leap, and they went through the open port of the moored space-flyer.

Spurts of flame came from smoky rear jets. A sound like thunder rolled into being, shaking the house and rattling the windows. For an instant the space-flyer was cushioned on a turmoil of flames. Jets beneath the prow tilted the nose upward. Then it darted swiftly into the heavens.

People over the solar system called the grizzled old man a dictator of the spacelanes, yet it would have been hard, even for a close acquaintance, to recognize Keith Randolph Marshall in the broken man who now stooped over the tele-panels, pleading for a wireless connection with the Space Police Bureau.

His next connection went through to a Dr. Haliburton, in the Medical Towers Building of San Francisco. Marshall was calmer now, but controlled himself only with an effort.

The mirror cleared to reveal a tall man in a laboratory apron, bent absorbedly over a retort. As the features turned to Marshall, a look of surprise gleamed behind gold-rimmed glasses and he tugged at the point of a distinguishing Van Dyke beard.

"What's wrong, Mr. Marshall?" he demanded. "Is Alyce ill--"

"Everything!" gasped Keith Randolph Marshall. "I'll explain later. Tell me, do you know young Rufus Thallin?"

"Indeed I do," responded the scientist with a frown. "I've been in private practise for several years since leaving the faculty of California School of Technology. An excellent pupil. Aptness for medicine. A future for him there, if he wants it....

"Since you speak of it," went on Dr. Haliburton curiously, "he was here only yesterday to talk over old times."

Marshall was tense as spring steel now and trying hard to conceal his extreme excitement.

"Then he's pretty good in a medical way?" he wanted to know savagely.

"Pretty good is no word for it!" exclaimed Dr. Haliburton. "Why, I saw him do a plastic operation once that would have stumped an old hand at surgery. It was on a Venus expedition of the faculty, and a man had become drunk and staggered into a grove of leper-plants. The flesh was peeling from both hands, and Rufus operated--with only a native dirk, mind you! He grafted plastic protoplasm to the tendons and saved both hands. An exceptionally fine bit of surgery...."

"Just what," demanded the dictator of spacelanes, "does he know about the Venus plague?"

Dark eyes narrowed and sparkled through the transparent lenses.

"Blue virus!" he exclaimed. "He's very interested. We discussed it at length, and also went over the records of your daughter's case. I gave her six months to live, as you know, and he--"

"That damned devil!" snorted Marshall in uncontrolled rage. "He was planning it all the time. Now he's kidnapped her and taken her to space."

For a moment the physician was stunned. He went quietly to a cabinet case and jerked open a drawer. His face above the beard became ashen.

"Her case records are gone," he said dazedly. "You must be right."

Incoherently, Marshall poured forth the story, and the savant listened incredulously, tugging at his trim beard.

"If she dies," shouted Marshall, swinging his fist, "he'll pay for it in the atomic blast chamber, with his life."

When the telecaster was silent, Dr. Haliburton stood for a long while, merely staring.

"No other would have dared!" he whispered awedly. "And there is a chance, a tiny chance. He risked his life on it. How I wish I had his courage!"

* * * * *

Rufus Thallin was afraid neither of his pursuers nor of their bullets as he fled from the Marshall manor. Not as long as the precious little bundle in his arms held the dim spark that was heir to the Marshall millions. Widely opened blue eyes were peering up at him, but not with fear. Only with a strange wonder that bordered on mental stupor.

"Don't be frightened," said young Rufus as they lumbered into the port aperture of the space-flyer. "I'm not going to hurt you."

He laid her on a pendant space cushion and she did not struggle.

"I'm not frightened," she said in a leaden tone. "All you could do is kill me. And I am not afraid of death. Neither would you harm me bodily, since I am no longer attractive as other girls are."

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.

"They'll catch you, won't they?" He was surprised at the limpid words. Alyce was lying on the swinging spring-couch, watching him in a detached lethargy.

"Good girl!" he exclaimed jubilantly. Her faint interest was evidence that there was still sap left in her body. "No, I don't think they'll catch us. Now, don't move around and exert yourself. Just remember that I'm your doctor now, and a pretty good doctor at that."

Right now those radiant, penetrating rays might be going through the hulls of the ship, passing through diseased cell tissue, rearranging the cellular patterns. He was determined not to frighten her. Words might soothe her. So he pointed to the dots in the rear vision screens, which were becoming larger.

"They're getting closer! That's because they're using the gravity repulsion system, and I'm still using rockets. The rockets are on full blast. There are about ten police ships hot on my trail. If I depended entirely on rocket blasts, I'd never get away from anti-gravity chasers."

As he spoke he was engrossed in making changes on the oval mechanism board.

"My new drive doesn't use an explosive blast," he explained. "The fuel doesn't explode, but changes into primitive radiation! This radiation shimmers away--at almost the speed of light. Due to its increased mass with its enormous velocity, it will exert an enormous force in the opposite direction."

An instrument on the board cackled, and he flipped a switch. A telescreen began to lighten. Those pursuit spacers were dangerously close now. Close enough to see uniformed men standing on their bridges, peering through glassite. From the nearest cylindrical shape a long tentacle was shot forth.

Magnetic grapple! It slithered past the front cowling of his space flyer, looped out and whipcracked back. If it had fastened to the outer berylumin hull, escape would have become impossible. Through transparent ports on all sides he saw the bulky noses of the Space Police ringing him in. Many eyes were watching him over the sights of grapple rockets.

Big Rufus Thallin grinned, turned and waved goodbye through the nearest port, then slammed a power throttle down.

"So long.... Howling Jupiter! What a jolt!"

Long trailers of flame vanished behind his jets. Now only a shimmering column of radiant force appeared. Rufus was jerked back against the seat. It was as though the space-flyer had just scooted into motion from a standstill.

One startled glance told him that the girl had passed into a coma. Jerking himself upright, he began to fight the throttle, which was jammed to the last notch and held there by the motion of swift acceleration.

In the nearest police craft a top-notch pilot was staring with popping eyes as the fugitive craft leaped ahead.

"Great blazing Antares!" exploded the "ace" spaceman, following the departing space-ship with his eyes. "Where'd he get that power? Lordy me, what speed!"

"Feed the juice into this star wagon!" groaned a Space Police commander, deeply chagrined. "He's got some new propelling force that has everything beat."

"They're getting away," gritted the pilot bitterly. "They're getting away, and we can't do a thing. All we can do is stand here and watch while that crazy man escapes to space with the poor girl."

In the craft ahead, Rufus' body was pulling away from the throttle. Blood was clogging up in his respiratory system. Though his breathing was smothered he held on grimly. The throttle snapped and he catapulted in a wild heap across the control room, smashing against a wall.

A sickening knowledge swept him. The lever had snapped at a crystallized joint, and was of no use now. He dropped it and went crawling across the floor on all fours.

Alarmed by the smoothness of the space-flyer's motion, he shot a fearful glance up at the accelerometer, to find the needle floating at zero. The power-thrust of radiant force had ceased as quickly as it had come into being.

It took little effort to get to his feet now. The police craft had kept on his trail and were gaining again. Automatically he reached out and snapped the rocket blasters into action to steady his space-ship. With the new propulsor disabled, he could only coast along with his newly gained momentum. The police ships were getting big again on the visor screens.