Murder in the Void Read online

  She obeyed, opening the outer door of the lock, stepping out into the void and using the hand-rocket she had picked up to propel her away from the Martian cruiser.

  In a few minutes she saw Crane's space-suited figure leaping out of the space-lock, using another hand-rocket. She met him, grasped his arm as they floated together at a distance from the cruiser.

  "What did you do?" she cried to him, her voice conducted to him by their touching space-suits.

  "I made sure that that cruiser will never drift onto any world and loose that awful plague there," he told her. "I laid a fuse to its tanks of rocket fuel."

  Even as Crane spoke, the distant Martian cruiser suddenly burst into terrific light, a destroying explosion that flamed for a moment like a new sun, then vanished.

  "That destroys the plague on the cruiser," Crane told her. "Now for ourselves — the culture is smeared all over our suits."

  * * *

  He took his hand-rocket and with its flame carefully seared every square inch of the outside of her metal suit. Lalla Dee did the same for him. The last germs of the deadly culture had been destroyed.

  "Before I laid the fuse, I used the cruiser's radio to call the Vulcan," Crane told her. "They're turning around to come back and pick us up."

  "And Doctor Alph's brain perished in that explosion too?" Lalla Dee cried. "No one else will ever find the secret of that culture?"

  "No one else, thank God!" said Crane. "It's a power too great for any world to have."

  "I'm glad that neither of us won this game, man of the TSS!" she exclaimed. "And I'll give the Vulcan's officers an explanation that will satisfy them, without letting them know the truth."

  "Look, there comes the ship now!" he said, pointing.

  Far off against the solemn stars, the lights of the returning Vulcan were showing. But Rab Crane was gazing past them, toward the distant green light-speck of his own world. No one there but his Chief would ever know the danger that had threatened that smiling world — and that had been averted.

  Only the Chief would ever know, and all the reward that Rab Crane would ever get from him would be a little longer, stronger handshake than usual.

  But that was reward enough for a man of the TSS.

  THE END

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