And for the first time in his career as an officer of the SSP, Lieutenant Daniel Mallory violated, deliberately, a rule of the Space Patrol handbook. He rammed the _Libra's_ controls into the robot hands of the Iron Mike, and abandoned his post in mid-flight! * * * * * It was not that he considered himself more capable than his captain or the second mate. His move was dominated by only one thing, the urgent need for haste. Safety rockets are, as everyone knows, blindingly fast. Much faster than the heavier, sturdier, cruising vessels that bear them like so many unfledged wallabies in a pouch. Give Smith a flying start and he would never be apprehended. And _he_, Dan Mallory, was much nearer a life-skiff port than the other officers up in the loft of the radio turret. Slipping, skidding, stumbling in his haste, he raced to the nearest port, flung open the control-bar, threw himself into the small, tear-shaped vehicle lying there. There were regulations demanding that air, food, water supplies be ascertained before flight in one of these was attempted. But there was no time for such nonsense now. Each second seemed an hour as Mallory warmed the hypatomic motors of the skiff, rammed the button that opened the _Libra's_ outer shell, struck another that catapulted the safety-rocket away from its parent craft. Then the dark of the womblike casing was gone, and he was blasting, under his own power, through space illumined with the candle-gleams of a trillion galactic motes. He set his range-finder and attractor--but even as their needles found their objective, his searching eyes located it. A tiny, silvery gleam against the tawny night ahead--a gleam from the stern of which flared burst upon flaming burst of superheated light. The rockets of Smith's skiff, hell-bent for Io! Minutes _had_ been precious! Vitally so. Already the little craft was countless thousands of miles before him. It was a wide margin that separated him; and in that margin lay the difference between freedom and peonage for forty thousand Earth-men, millions of Ionians, the difference between life and death for the girl Smith had kidnaped, the difference between victory and defeat for the Solar Patrolmen. There was only one way to catch Smith. Recognizing the fact, Dan Mallory bit his lip, set his jaw stubbornly. Acceleration! Acceleration great enough to fling him across the yawning void, enable him to snare his quarry in tensiles.... And he was not strapped! No safety corset to hold tight the straining cords of his viscera, no yards of gauze padding to keep his wracked body from literally flinging itself to shreds. No--