in the safe and never mind killing you. I
said to them that you were pretty good eggs and I didn't like to bump
you off, see?"

"I see," said Manning.

He turned his back on Scorio and started to walk away. The gangster
chief came half-way out of his chair, and as he did so, Russ reached out
a single finger and tapped a key. Scorio screamed and beat with his
fists against the wall of force that had suddenly formed about him. That
single tap on the great keyboard had sprung a trap, had been the one
factor necessary to bring into being a force shell already spun and
waiting for him.

Manning did not even turn around at Scorio's scream. He slowly paced his
way down the line of standing gangsters. He stopped in front of Pete and
looked at him.

"Pete," he said, "you've sprung a good many prisons, haven't you?"

"There ain't a jug in the System that can hold me," Pete boasted, "and
that's a fact."

"I believe there's one that could," Greg told him. "One that no man has
ever escaped from, or ever will."

"What's that?" demanded Pete.

"The Vulcan Fleet," said Greg.

Pete looked into the eyes of the man before him and read the purpose in
those eyes. "Don't send me there! Send me any place but there!"

Greg turned to Russ and nodded. Russ's fingers played their tune of doom
upon the keyboard. His thumb depressed a lever. With a roar five
gigantic material energy engines screamed with thrumming power.

Pete disappeared.

The engines roared with thunderous throats, a roar that seemed to drown
the laboratory in solid waves of sound. A curious refractive effect
developed about the straining hulks as space near them bent under their
lashing power.

Months ago Russ and Greg had learned a better way of transmitting power
than by metal bars or through conducting beams. Beams of such power as
were developing now would have smashed atoms to protons and electrons.
Through a window in the side of the near engine, Greg could see the iron
ingot used as fuel dwindling under the sucking force.

* * * * *

The droning died and only a hum remained.

"He's in a prison now he'll never get out of," said Greg calmly. "I
wonder what they'll think when they find him, dressed in civilian
clothes and carrying a heat gun. They'll clap him into a photo-cell and
keep him there until they investigate. When they find out who he is, he
won't get out--he has enough unfinished prison sentences to last a
cent