And Guy, running back Solward outside of the cone of expectancy with the barrier on, detected them at extreme range and laughed. He left them running in the opposite direction, and when they were far beyond range, Guy dropped his barrier and drove at an angle away from Sol which added to a quartering course from Pluto by the time he had the course corrected. He drove solid for days at 1-G, and then decelerated in an upwards vector which carried him a billion miles to the north of the Celestial Equator and ten billion miles from Sol. He turned again and ran tangent to the circle from his position to Sol, and dropped slightly southward. Again he came to a stop. Then, with a sad shake of his head, he abandoned the _Loki_. He dropped from the larger ship in the tiniest of lifeships, and taking the barrier-generator with him, he let the _Loki_ drive across the System towards Mephisto, while he in the lifeship gave a short, ten minute thrust at 10-Gs and set up the barrier again. If any detectors had been close enough to catch him, they would be souped-up to the limit of gain, for his own super-sensitive detectors caught no pursuit. At that range, both lifeship and _Loki_ would appear as a single drive, and when he disappeared, only _Loki_ at 10-Gs would remain to lead them across the Solar System towards Mephisto. He laughed. If this chase had been a chase to the death, he'd have been dead by now. But they had preferred to let him think he was being let alone, or that they had lost him. He'd given them the slip, he knew. And if they were still on the lookout, they'd follow _Loki_ right across that vast orbit and beyond Mephisto on the other side. Better than twenty billion miles! And with _Loki_ running on clockwork for the barrier, and with the autopilot set for a series of gyrations with an apparent ending of the course completely unpredictable and yet obviously better than fifty billion miles beyond Mephisto, in an area that covered as much sky as the orbit of Mars itself-- They'd spend a lot of time thinking of that one. It was slightly funny, though. The Terran mathematicians did not know that Guy was starting for Pluto in the first place. They believed that the initial start was but a throw-off direction on the secret way to Ertene. They based their probabilities on that one fact, and built their house of mathematical cards on that false premise. They came up with what they thought to be a shrewd guess--and when the _Loki_ was picked up rifling across the Solar System in the direction of Mephisto, they jumped up and down in glee. The Laws of Probabilities had coincided with the Laws of Absolute Randomness, the basic rule of which argument is that there are no laws that prevail. And while the Solar System combed the vastness of space beyond Mephisto for the hidden planet, Guy Maynard was coasting out of the Solar System on the opposite side, approaching the hidden planet in truth. * * * * *