"I was a cadet aboard the Saturn," Nadia explained. "Now just exactly what are you? And what do you want aboard the Nova?" Gavin was silent a moment. "Now you're going to lie," accused the girl angrily. "No. On the contrary, I'm going to ask you the same question. Your own position can't be too secure. That's why you had to back me up with that artistic lie in Trev's office. You were afraid they'd start asking you questions ... I wouldn't be surprised if you were a T.I.S. agent!" The girl looked startled. A flush suffused her pale cheeks. She said, "So that's how you plan to shut my mouth. You devil! You know that if Cabot even suspected such a thing he'd kill me." "Well," said Gavin coolly. "I don't know that any of us can afford to take a chance if you're a T.I.S. agent." "Hush!" pleaded Nadia in agony. "Look what it would mean. We'd be condemned to the Lunar Corrective Colony." She gripped his arm desperately. "But I'm not! I'm not!" She regained her composure with an effort and went on in a low bitter tone, "I have been proscribed! Does that answer your questions? I killed a man. He was a high official of Tri-World. The corporation put a price on my head." The Terran government was humanitarian. Capital punishment had been abolished along with a score of other institutions such as marriage, divorce and the family. But the big corporations were the real rulers. Feudal in character, they maintained their power by purges that would have made the bloody twentieth century snow white by comparison. Their property, their officials were inviolate. Their law was a tooth for a tooth, and their gunmen hung on the trail of an offender whom they had proscribed until they caught up with him. If the girl was telling the truth, she was as good as dead. Sooner or later, ten—twenty years, it made no difference, the agents of Tri-World would catch up with her. "Why did you kill him?" "He—he...." She glanced at the deck, flushed faintly. "Nonsense," said Gavin. "People don't get killed for that any more. Why did you kill him?" She looked at him, startled. "He caught me drawing a plan of Tri-World's magnetic ore-loader. It was a corporation secret. I was just a kid, a cadet aboard the Saturn. I—I was offered a lot of money for the plans...." She halted lamely. "Who offered you the money?" "Trev." Her voice was a whisper. Gavin was surprised only at the fact that Nadia had confessed such a thing. She had placed herself completely in his power as long as she lived. "I didn't ask you here to tell you that," she broke in on his speculations. Her voice was unsteady. "But to show you something. Look." And she pointed behind them towards Venus. Gavin at first could see nothing except the yellow sun with its spectacular corona. Then he discovered a faint streak like the luminous trail of a meteor. After a second he made out a second and a third.