hat. He must have known it too."

"But why? What was he thinking of?"

"Maybe he thought he could make it. Maybe he thought it was the only
chance...."

There was no other answer that Greg could see, and the ache in his chest
was deeper.

There was no way to bring Tom back now. However things had been between
them, they could never be changed now. But he knew that as long as he
was still breathing, somebody somehow was going to answer for that last
desperate run of the _Scavenger_....

* * * * *

It had been an excellent idea, Tom Hunter thought to himself, and it had
worked perfectly, exactly as he had planned it ... so far. But now, as
he clung to his precarious perch, he wondered if it had not worked out a
little too well. The first flush of excitement that he had felt when he
saw the _Scavenger_ blow apart in space had begun to die down now; on
its heels came the unpleasant truth, the realization that only the easy
part lay behind him so far. The hard part was yet to come, and if that
were to fail....

He realized, suddenly, that he was afraid. He was well enough concealed
at the moment, clinging tightly against the outside hull of the Ranger
ship, hidden behind the open airlock door. But soon the airlock would be
pulled closed, and then the real test would come.

Carefully, he ran through the plan again in his mind. He was certain now
that his reasoning was right. There had been two dozen men on the raider
ship; there had been no question, even from the start, that they would
succeed in boarding the orbit-ship and taking its occupants prisoners.
The Jupiter Equilateral ship had not appeared there by coincidence. They
had come looking for something that they had not found.

And the only source of information left was Roger Hunter's sons. The
three of them together might have held the ship for hours, or even
days ... but with engines and radios smashed, there had been no hope
of contacting Mars for help. Ultimately, they would have been taken.

As he had crouched in the dark storage hold in the orbit-ship, Tom had
realized this. He had also realized that, once captured, they would
never have been freed and allowed to return to Mars.

If the three of them were taken, they were finished. But what if only
two were taken? He had pushed it aside as a foolish idea, at first. The
boarding party would never rest until they had accounted for all three.
They wouldn't dare go back to