Rufus caught her in his arms, returned her to the couch. There he administered a sleeping gas. Even after that brief exertion she must have rest.

But he was exuberant. Seized with unbearable emotions of delight, he grabbed the controls and sent the space-flyer in dizzy spirals and crazy patterns while the girl lay sleeping.

His scheme had been triumphant, though not as he had expected. A tiny mechanism, unrolling a strip of celluloid film, had been buried on the space-wireless, and a beam of light had carried his clever imitation of voices from the supposed broadcast.

The spark of life was being fanned, not by an emotion aroused from the sound of a familiar voice, but from hate. She had seen him standing there, uncaring, with a grin on his face, and she had wanted to kill him. Wanted to do it so badly that she had wasted her last bit of strength when her eye chanced to fall on the flame-gun.

Rufus Thallin chuckled. He hadn't planned that she should hate him so terribly, but that would do just as well. It would give her a reason for living.

There was a terrestrial calendar in the bottom of a cabinet drawer. At its top was a picture of a nearly nude beautiful girl, poised over the waters of a moonlit lake. Laughing hoarsely, the earthman began ripping the months away, one by one. At last he came to a sheet encircled by a ring of crimson. That meant death for Alyce. That was the deadline set by the physicians who had made their examinations on earth.

His big hand continued to jerk away at the month sheets, until the calendar year was bare, and only the picture of the alluring girl beckoned at him from the calendar. It would be a great joke on those brilliant savants. For the six months had gone by—and as many more.

And Alyce Marshall had just learned to hate.

CHAPTER IV SPACE THE HEALER

There were a hundred ways to build hate in the mind of the convalescent, and Rufus Thallin used them all. He circled back among the worlds of the planetary system, and began skirting the habitable planets to arouse her curiosity. That was the way he encountered Frenchy Logrieux again.

Luck had not gone well with the little pirate. Several rash encounters with armed merchantmen had cost many piratical lives. There had been no plunder, and much grumbling had ensued among the remaining buccaneers. The ships began to 

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