The
lines had shrunken; their lengths now stretched scarcely over three or
four degrees. The scope showed the Queen was still there spatially, but
the fuzziness of her outline indicated she was well out of danger--high
up on the ascending node of the arc.

"What's on the program, Altman?" Brad asked bitterly. "Let me guess....
I slip through the barrier. Passage at slow speed makes pretty much of a
pulpy mess out of my body. You pop the Queen through in a
milli-second.... You got a nice story to tell: You arrived as I was
slipping through. You couldn't do anything to stop me. You plunged
through after me. With a dead skipper aboard, the ship and cargo were
free to the first one who came along. You took the cargo, it being high
priority stuff. You left the ship, it being outdated, battered, useless
and drifting in normal interstellar where it would never be found. You
took what was left of the skipper, it being good evidence to
substantiate your tale."

"Now Brad, boy!" Altman stretched the words out in mock reprimand. "You
know _I_ wouldn't do a thing like _that_. You know the West Cluster
contract doesn't mean _that_ much to _me_!"

There was a long silence. Apparently Altman wasn't going to interrupt
it. Brad looked back at the scope. The Queen had withdrawn spatially and
hyperspatially.

The pains in his body rose sharply and he grimaced, biting down on his
lips. A knife slipped into his abdomen, twisted and shot up through his
chest and into his head. Then an incendiary bomb went off somewhere in
his stomach.

He reached for the control of the good main hyperjet. Then, as his face
contorted with near agony, he punched down on it.

The pain left swiftly. The ship rattled and clanked and ground
hatefully, its new cacophony of protest drowning out the old
_clank-sss_, _boom_ and _throom-throom_. The small blurs in the sky
elongated--five degrees, ten, twelve, twenty, twenty-five, forty.... The
Cluster Queen's outline on the scope became sharp and then faded into
fuzziness once more as the Fleury passed it hyperspatially along the
ascending node of the arc.

He pressed the normal drive jet lever and it spluttered weakly, creating
not even enough discordant sounds in the wracked ship to drown out the
_boom, throom, clank-sss_ symphony. The dot on the scope representing
the Queen faded into insignificance. With a sweep of his hand, he killed
power in the automatic distress transmitter.

Now it would take the Q