Leave Niala? Abandon her to Gort Bro-Doral and his sadistic vengeance for the sabotage Glayne himself had performed? No! That was out of the question. But what of the Terran Combine? What did the life of Citizen Niala Chodred mean against the lives of the trillions who made up that Combine to which she had sworn allegiance? Viewed in that light, it was obvious that the life of one person was a cheap price to pay for security of the Combine against the Tane Jewel. Glayne crouched in the shadow and buried his face in his hands. In an agony of indecision he prodded his weary mind to discover an alternative to the horrible dilemma. But he could find none. He would have to decide between Niala, the laughing, green-eyed Niala, and the ideal of human progress which he had sworn the Guardian Oath to protect. Dully he realized that the power of the abstract was too strong. He would forsake Niala. The pain redoubled itself as he made his decision but he set his face in a granite-mask against it. Unfortunately it was not so easy to quell the agony that burned within him. Grimly he stood up. He saw that the time had come for action. The message craft was slowly jetting down the cinder blastway toward the lock door. Glayne tensed for an instant, then raced for the launch, covering ten meters at a stride in the light gravity. Three Delban mechanics caught sight of him as he rounded the stubby fins and leaped for the lock. In mid-stride he whipped out his Cardy gun and brought them down in charred heaps. A guard squad saw him and fired. Their beams sang dangerously close, smashing into the beralloy side of the launch. They crunched down the blastway in pursuit as Glayne jumped through the open lock, slammed it shut, and darted to the controls. The atomic driver engine coughed and surged into life. He let it scream up beyond audibility, then fed power to the jets. The blast washed over the guards who were closest to the launch and the others fell back hastily before its searing heat. The inner lock of the entrance port had slid shut behind the message craft. It was now or never, Glayne realized. He opened the atomic driver wide and the stubby launch shuddered for an instant, then lunged for the lock. The sudden thrust created constricting hands about Glayne's chest and he fought precariously on the edge of blacking out. For a brief instant Glayne was aware of the huge outer doors swinging shut before him--and then the air pressure struck them and flung the launch bodily through the narrow space left between them.