Grinning savagely, his hand sought the button that would smash Smith's ship into oblivion--then stayed! Lady Alice! He could not destroy her with Smith. Because now he knew, certainly and surely, two things. One of which was that she must be the bearer of the secret ray formula to Io. In no other way could you account for the fact that Smith had dared everything to kidnap her. She carried the secret, not in papers, but in her mind. Were she to die--and might the gods of space forbid that his hand should destroy her loveliness!--Kreuther would still be the victor. For with her would perish the final hope of the besieged New Fresno garrison. The other thing he realized was-- But there was no time for that now. His fingers spurned the ray button; found another. A jolt shivered the space-skiff from fore-quartz to rocket as his tensile beam reached across the closing miles, fastened its grip on Smith's craft. Mallory's grin tightened. He cut motors. His tensile beam would contract like a rubber band, drawing the two ships together. Smith, feeling that beam upon him, unable to sheer it off, would not be able to turn a lethal radiation upon him now. For the tensile beam was a perfect conduction ray. To destroy one ship meant to destroy both. There was a groan behind him. Shocked, he turned. From the storage bin, bleeding from nose, ears, mouth, body twisted as though wrung through some gigantic mangler, crawled the missing jewel thief--Albert Lemming! * * * * * Mallory choked, sickened. "Lord, man! How did you get aboard here? Why--" Liquid breath gurgled in Lemming's throat. Glaze filmed his eyeballs. "Tried to--" he panted, "--stow away. Wilmot dead--knew suspect me--hid--" His head fell forward to the floor. Dan fingered his pulse, found there not the feeblest stir of life. Lemming, fleeing the dreaded breath of suspicion, had lost the more important breath of life. The miracle was that he had survived, even so long, the tremendous acceleration that had taxed all Mallory's space-trained, protected faculties. And the two space-skiffs closed inexorably the gap between them. Mallory's quick brain leaped to the final problem. But before he could solve it, the small skiff audio burst into speech. "Well done, whoever you are!" said the voice from the other skiff. "But you realize it won't do you any good?" Mallory rasped, "I'm coming alongside in a minute, Smith. Stand by to surrender peaceably, or--" "Or?" mocked the ex-space officer. "So it's you, Lieutenant? I might have guessed it. Your valor is exceeded only by your lack of foresight. I repeat, your hectic pursuit has done you no good." "Never mind the talk. Stand by. This is the end," said Mallory. "This is checkmate, Smith."