"Get out," he snapped. Color surged into the girl's face, then faded, leaving the skin a sickly white. She shrank from him, pressing against the far wall. "I read it in your eyes," she whispered. "You were thinking of _killing_ me!" The Falcon flushed angrily, more at himself than at the girl, hating himself for thinking such thoughts, hating the twisted years that had warped him to the point that he acted like the scum he had weeded from among his men. "Get out," he said again, and his voice was softer. "I mean you no harm." He flicked a glance from the port, toward the sky where the violet beams of mass-detectors probed the sky and earth. She slid from the seat, took the two steps to the port, opened it with a surge of lithe strength. She dropped to the ground, followed by the Falcon. There was a puzzled fear in her eyes, a fear that grew by the moment as she saw the sleek Kent-Horter quiescent on the sand. The Falcon stepped lithely about his prisoner, whistled with a queerly distorted note, and the port came automatically open. He gestured with the gun, impatience flaming in his eyes as she hesitated. "Walk--or be carried," he warned grimly. * * * * * The girl scrambled into the pirate ship. Curt Varga stepped in behind her, dogged the door shut with almost casual flicks of his right hand. He urged the girl before him with the gun, waved her into a sleeping cubicle, then pulled the door shut, locked it. Holstering the dis-gun, he raced to the pilot room, slid into the pilot's seat. He warmed the rockets with brief twitches of his fingers on the control studs, then pulled the drive switch a third of the way back. He felt the thrust of the rockets against his body, saw the brief flicker of the girl's ship whipping past the port. Then his ship was fleeing with accelerating speed into the tenuous atmosphere. A dis-cannon rolled the ship, almost sent it on beam's end. He straightened her, poured the power into the Kent converters, flicked out of range with amazing ease. Air whistled through the purifying-system, and he cut the rheostat down a bit when the reading gave an Earth-norm. Then, and only then, did he relax. He set a reading into the calculator, flicked on the robot control, and walked slowly back to the sleeping cubicle he had momentarily made into a cell. "Come on out, now," he said, swung the door fully open. She had been crying, and the defiant gesture with which she tried to hide that fact built a tiny warm glow in Curt Varga's heart. But he didn't permit that feeling to show; he knew he had to keep the girl more or less cowed, if he were to have no trouble with her. "Come on," he said again. "We'll declare a truce for the time." She stepped past him, walked toward the pilot's room. He followed, liking her unconscious swagger which matched his own. She refused to sit, and he took one empty seat, regarded her quizzically, as he rolled a _pulnik_ cigarette.