the shimmering wake of the improved radiotron—again an opalescent beam of pure radiation hurled the space-flyer into the astral depths at speeds his accelerometer was incapable of registering.

The outside planets, discovered only during the last decade, came and went. Tiny Minerva, like an icy pearl under its coating of liquid air, whisked by. The black spongy mass of huge Siegfried, a burned-out hulk of a world, lumbered to the rearward. Then at last huge Hermes, the outer guardian, with its monstrous satellite Cerberus, hove into view. A sentinel and his watch-dog.

Now they were in open space, with only the vast abysses beyond. Days flickered by rapidly. The sunlight, so much fainter now, was collected by huge mirrors and thrown into the front compartment of the space-flyer, where Rufus Thallin had rigged curtains to give the girl privacy when she slept. Days were marching by unmarked—for here in space there was no beginning and no end—only the roll and sway of the space-ship as it plunged on and on.

Rufus Thallin was fighting the battle of his life, despite the extraspacial serenity. Not with actual, living opponents. That was what made his struggle so hard. He couldn't get his big fists on the blue virus that made diseased flesh look like jelly in a strong sunlight.

Always there was the grim knowledge that behind them the pursuit would never end. Though the Space Police had been thrown off the trail, they would be questing even now for new leads, new spoors that might send them speeding in the wake of the space-flyer, even here in this Stygian depth of outer space.

Of course he had a watch to measure hours. He used it to plot a diet of synthetic foods for the girl, and followed it religiously. He was not so careful with his own.

Her spark of life was still glowing, though dimly. It needed kindling. New energies must build that spark to a flame, but those energies could not be fed from the outside.

He could take a microscope and look deep into her body, see the arteries pulsate, watch the slow rivers of great veins heading back toward her heart. But the virus, if such it was, remained invisible, a skulking menace he could only sense. A menace vulnerable, as he knew, only to the mysterious radiations that came out of the macrocosmos.

Yet before nature began its healing work that inner spark, the vital "will" to live, must be nurtured. The body itself would only 

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