"Cross your fingers ... Pell out."

Briefly the electros shrieked up the scale to inaudibility followed by the muffled, reluctant keening of the converter. Pell looked through the forward plastine observation shield. The liner was also warming up its converters; occasionally a shower of red-hot cinders flew out of the blast pit as the pilot gunned his converters. Any minute now ... there it was!

Slowly the huge liner wallowed from its elevated cradle cushioned on a pillar of blue flame. Pell opened his own feed valves a trifle and his primitive converter responded nicely, thrusting the Mark III out of its cradle and up after the passenger liner. Slowly Pell advanced the feed, trying to match the liner's lift. Presently he lost sight of the liner as its speed mounted, but he was familiar with the trajectory it used and he followed it at four G's.

His vizer light was blinking an angry red. He flipped it on and the corpulent, blotched face of a petty official blossomed out of the gray nothingness of the screen.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" he blustered at Pell. "If you do not decelerate at once, I shall order the planet-mounteds to fire on you!"

Pell tried to force a blank look on his face. "What do you mean, sir? This is a DIC passenger liner headed for Mars. Didn't we pass the Geiger Check?"

The official looked sick. Then his face became an enraged, mottled red. "If you think you can get away with this...." he sputtered.

Pell laughed at him and flipped the vizer off. He looked at his instruments ... another minute now. The back of his shoulders crawled as he contemplated the unpleasant possibility of a planet-mounted blaster burning the little ship to a cinder. Over his vizi-phone he heard the official trying to contact the liner. Again he looked quickly at his instruments. Now!

Savagely he opened the converter feed valves and the little ship leaped forward. His fingers played with practiced ease on the jet keys, forcing the ship into a wildly spiralling trajectory. Its path soon resembled a jagged fork of lightning. Let 'em try to get a fix on that, he reflected.

Far off to his left he fancied he saw the dim, almost-spent radiance of a blaster probing for him. Laughing to himself, he straightened the course of the ship and piled on the acceleration. Like the second hand of a clock, the acceleration dial moved up the scale.

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