CHAPTER III

AN OLD FRIEND

He reached for the flame-gun at his belt, then glanced at the pale features of the girl on the swinging couch. No, it wouldn't do. He wouldn't resist when they boarded. They'd get him in the end and it would only endanger her life foolishly.

A chattering of the space-wireless signal told him he was being contacted for communication.

Heart sinking, he plugged in, cutting in a serried bank of glowing tubes. Static rattled, and a mottled picture began to form.

"That's odd!" he told himself. "They didn't try to contact me before. And odd because those police are blue devils for radio wizardry. I've never seen their power so low!"

A pleased chuckle came from an amplifier.

"Don't worry none, Doc," the hoarse voice continued. "It ain't th' coppers! Hell, my televiz panel's not so hot, but I like 'em that way."

Murky on the reforming mirror, he saw a dark visage with keen piercing eyes, a tiny mustache over a cruel hyphen of a mouth. The features were vaguely familiar.

"Who are you?" he demanded of his mysterious caller. "And where are you calling from?"

"My name's Frenchy Logrieux!" spoke the black image. "We're up ahead of you, some fifty space-ships, and every one a battler. The police won't dare come up to us, so just head your space-flyer into our middle, Doc. Look here, Doc, remember these!" Great hamlike hands were thrust before the televisor screen. Scarred and misshapen, the flesh had obviously been grafted back to the tendons.

"Venus Colony!" exclaimed Rufus Thallin amazedly. "And the leprous fang-weeds. Now I remember you, Frenchy."

"Sure you do," grinned the slit of a mouth. "And I ain't never forgot a young doc by the name of Thallin. When I hears the police broadcast, giving out that you'd kidnapped ye a wench and made off wid her, I says, now he's after yer own heart, Frenchy. I got a bit of sparkle for romance in me blood, and here's a good half hundred stout space-ships flyin' the skull and crossbones that'll see you through, Doc, till high hell freezes over."

"Okay," returned Rufus Thallin. "I'll make a run for you. Give me your position, and I'll split right through."

He sighted the cluster of dark hulks against a darker background of space, but he also sighted the police craft, moving near again and preparing to fire out their magnetic hooks. Pushing a starboard jet-throttle down, Rufus corrected his angle of flight, losing a precious bit of momentum as he did so, heading his space-flyer straight for the pirate craft.

The space police were drifting away in the rear. Temporarily, their pursuit would be ended. It was impossible that they had not noticed the large flotilla of piratical space-ships ahead. To have tried to break through would have been sheer folly.

The black spindular hulls held a rough circle formation. Rufus aimed the prow of his spacer through them and flashed beyond. Ahead of them was the dull grayness of open space.

He was hardly aware that the furtive image of Frenchy Logrieux was still on an upper panel, and that the keen piercing eyes were flashing rapidly over the interior, coming to rest at last on the motionless shape of Alyce Marshall.

"Right nice little space-flyer ye got there, Doc," chuckled the space buccaneer. "Care to join up with a bunch of me hearties?"

"No thanks, Frenchy," answered Rufus Thallin, waving farewell. "This makes us even."

"Sure thing, Doc," said Frenchy Logrieux, smirking significantly toward the bed. "I got a streak for frills meself. Happy voyage, Doc, and I can't say I care much for yer taste fer wenches."

The image faded and Rufus Thallin said nothing. He had no relish for the idea of being obligated to a pirate. He was glad that his score was even with Frenchy Logrieux.

Ahead of him, a black planet was swimming out of the void. Dark and foreboding, that lustreless sphere had an evil repute throughout the solar system. It was a barren, lifeless world, and one to be avoided by living creatures. Rufus Thallin headed the spacer in that direction. He knew that it was Pluto.

Repairs were made, and Pluto was far in the shimmering wake of the improved radiotron--again an opalescent beam of pure radiation hurled the space-flyer into the astral depths at speeds his accelerometer was incapable of registering.

The outside planets, discovered only during the last decade, came and went. Tiny Minerva, like an icy pearl under its coating of liquid air, whisked by. The black spongy mass of huge Siegfried, a burned-out hulk of a world, lumbered to the rearward. Then at last huge Hermes, the outer guardian, with its monstrous satellite Cerberus, hove into view. A sentinel and his watch-dog.

Now they were in open space, with only the vast abysses beyond. Days flickered by rapidly. The sunlight, so much fainter now, was collected by huge mirrors and thrown into the front compartment of the space-flyer, where Rufus Thallin had rigged curtains to give the girl privacy when she slept. Days were marching by unmarked--for here in space there was no beginning and no end--only the roll and sway of the space-ship as it plunged on and on.

Rufus Thallin was fighting the battle of his life, despite the extraspacial serenity. Not with actual, living opponents. That was what made his struggle so hard. He couldn't get his big fists on the blue virus that made diseased flesh look like jelly in a strong sunlight.

Always there was the grim knowledge that behind them the pursuit would never end. Though the Space Police had been thrown off the trail, they would be questing even now for new leads, new spoors that might send them speeding in the wake of the space-flyer, even here in this Stygian depth of outer space.

Of course he had a watch to measure hours. He used it to plot a diet of synthetic foods for the girl, and followed it religiously. He was not so careful with his own.

Her spark of life was still glowing, though dimly. It needed kindling. New energies must build that spark to a flame, but those energies could not be fed from the outside.

He could take a microscope and look deep into her body, see the arteries pulsate, watch the slow rivers of great veins heading back toward her heart. But the virus, if such it was, remained invisible, a skulking menace he could only sense. A menace vulnerable, as he knew, only to the mysterious radiations that came out of the macrocosmos.

Yet before nature began its healing work that inner spark, the vital "will" to live, must be nurtured. The body itself would only respond when her desire to continue life had been instilled. And that would never be when she lay in that perpetual coma, not caring whether she lived or died.

He began to plot desperately, knowing that this twilight state would not last forever. Perhaps the sound of a loved one's voice, the awakening of old memories of earth, would reach through the gloom and arouse her lethargic brain. At least it was worth a chance.

The curtains across the control room were shoved back against the wall. He was sitting nonchalantly before the mechanisms when the space-wireless began to sputter, roar harsh words.

"This is ZIX, Earth Space Station in San Francisco!" shouted the amplifier. "Tonight we are cutting into our regular programs so that a frightened, sick old man can make a last desperate appeal over the ether. To ships of space, and especially to one pirate craft on whose board is a kidnaper, we give you the voice of Keith Randolph Marshall!"

The thin face against the coverlet had moved. The eyes were wide and staring, watching him. He hoped desperately that she was listening as well.

Over the space-wireless a familiar voice began speaking, vibrantly but brokenly.

"I am hoping that Rufus Thallin, kidnaper of my daughter, will hear me now. If you do, you will know that your crime will be forgotten if you return my little girl to me. She is all that I have, all that I have ever loved. Somehow, against my better judgment, I feel that she is still alive. Bring her back to me, and you may have my pledge. Every spacer of the Marshall Spacelines will be turned over to you."

The announcer's voice, booming and sympathetic, cut back in, "So you have heard the final plea of a tired old man, whose health has been broken and is under the constant care of doctors, who is hoping against hope that a miracle may be achieved, and the hard heart of a criminal softened by a father's plea...."

Alyce was moving. He didn't dare look, as he pretended to deliberate the words from the radio, then stalked across the metal floor slowly. He snapped the switch on the announcer's voice, then wheeled about.

She was standing there, a frail phantom, but her eyes were like jets of flame. Terrible hate burned from the wasted contours. Now she was tottering toward a wall, with one hand reaching where a holstered flame-gun was hung. The weapon was too high. Upon this realization, she collapsed.

Rufus caught her in his arms, returned her to the couch. There he administered a sleeping gas. Even after that brief exertion she must have rest.

But he was exuberant. Seized with unbearable emotions of delight, he grabbed the controls and sent the space-flyer in dizzy spirals and crazy patterns while the girl lay sleeping.

His scheme had been triumphant, though not as he had expected. A tiny mechanism, unrolling a strip of celluloid film, had been buried on the space-wireless, and a beam of light had carried his clever imitation of voices from the supposed broadcast.

The spark of life was being fanned, not by an emotion aroused from the sound of a familiar voice, but from hate. She had seen him standing there, uncaring, with a grin on his face, and she had wanted to kill him. Wanted to do it so badly that she had wasted her last bit of strength when her eye chanced to fall on the flame-gun.

Rufus Thallin chuckled. He hadn't planned that she should hate him so terribly, but that would do just as well. It would give her a reason for living.

There was a terrestrial calendar in the bottom of a cabinet drawer. At its top was a picture of a nearly nude beautiful girl, poised over the waters of a moonlit lake. Laughing hoarsely, the earthman began ripping the months away, one by one. At last he came to a sheet encircled by a ring of crimson. That meant death for Alyce. That was the deadline set by the physicians who had made their examinations on earth.

His big hand continued to jerk away at the month sheets, until the calendar year was bare, and only the picture of the alluring girl beckoned at him from the calendar. It would be a great joke on those brilliant savants. For the six months had gone by--and as many more.

And Alyce Marshall had just learned to hate.