His grandfather had told him many tales of the "Starshine." She had made voyages of as long as two years in emptiness, at full acceleration, during which she had covered four hundred light-years of space, had purified her air, and fed her crew. Her tanks could hold fuel for six years' drive at full acceleration and her food-synthesizers, primitive as they were by modern standards, could yet produce some four hundred foodstuffs from the carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and traces of other elements into which almost any organic raw material could be resolved.

She was, in fact, one of the last and most useful space-ships ever constructed at the last space-ship yard in existence. She was almost certainly the last ever to be used. But she was only a museum-piece now and her switches were opened and her control-cables severed lest visitors to the museum injure her. But Kim's grandfather had lectured him at great length upon her qualities. The old gentleman had had an elderly man's distaste for modern perfectionism.

Kim threw switches here and there. He spliced cables wherever he found them cut. He was hungry and he was gaunt, and he worked with a bitter anticipation of failure. He had been in the museum for almost an hour, and in the ship for half of that, when voices called politely through the barrier-grille.

"Citizen Kim Rendell, may we enter?"

He made sure it was safe, then opened the way.

"Enter and welcome, citizens," he said ironically, in the prescribed formula. But his hands were clenched and he was all ready to fight for his life.

CHAPTER II

Break for Freedom

Slowly the Prime Board of Alphin III filed up the flush ladder and into the cabin of the "Starshine." There was Malby, who looked like an elderly sheep. There was Ponter, who rather resembled an immature frog. There was Shimlo, who did not look like anything but an advanced case of benevolent imbecility, and Burt, who at least looked intelligent and whom Kim Rendell hated with a corrosive hatred.

"Greeting, citizen," Malby said. Even his voice had a bleating quality. "Despite your crime, we have broken all precedent to come and reason with you. You are not mad, yet you act like a 

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