sed
and garbled. Now the second-level bulkheads were being attacked. Over a
third of the compartments were leaking precious air into outer space.

When a terrified section chief came through with a report that two Greg
Hunters had been spotted by the same man at the same time, and that the
guards in the sector were shooting at anything that moved, including
other guards, Tawney made his way to the radio cabin and put through a
frantic signal to Jupiter Equilateral headquarters on Mars.

The contact took forever, even with the ship's powerful emergency
boosters. By the time someone at headquarters was reading him, Tawney's
report sounded confused. He was trying for the third time to explain,
clearly and logically, how two men and a ghost were scuttling his
orbit-ship under his very feet when one wall of the cabin vanished in a
crackle of blue fire, and he found himself staring at two Greg Hunters
and a grim-faced Johnny Coombs.

He made squeaky noises into the microphone and dropped it with a crash.
He groped for a chair; Johnny jerked him to his feet again. "A
scout-ship," he said tersely. "Clear it for launching. We want one with
plenty of fuel, and we don't want a single guard anywhere near the
airlock." He picked up an intercom microphone and thrust it into the
little fat man's trembling hand. "Now move! And you'd better be sure
they understand you, because you're coming with us."

Merrill Tawney stared first at Tom, then at Greg, and finally at the
microphone. Then he moved. The orders he gave to his section chiefs were
very clear and concise.

He had never argued with a ghost before, and he didn't care to start
now.

* * * * *

It was over so quickly that it seemed to Tom it had just begun, and if
so much had not been at stake, it might have been fun.

It had been the gun ... the remarkable gun that Roger Hunter had left as
his legacy ... that had been the key. It ate through steel and aluminum
alloy like putty. Whatever its power source, however it worked, by
whatever means it had been built, there had been no match for it on the
orbit-ship.

It had _worked_ ... and that was all that mattered right then.

With it, and with the advantage of a ghost that walked like a
man ... Tom Hunter, to be exact ... they had reduced the Jupiter
Equilateral orbit-ship to a smoking wreck in something less than thirty
minutes.

The signal came back that a scout-ship was ready, unguarded.