Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 12.djvu/10

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
There was a problem when proofreading this page.

Dane Cabot was just one of many slaves of the dictators, but out in space was a secret that was the key to freedom—if he found it.

"DAMN women, anyhow!"

Dark shadows of fury lay in the eyes of Dane Cabot as he throttled raw fuel into the humming rocket tubes. Leaping toward the stars with a wild burst of power the tiny space cruiser cast aside the gravity of the Earth as a dog shakes off water. Dane crouched sullenly over the controls, fingers claw-like on the accelerators. The power song of the rocket exhausts and the shrill straining of tortured girders were like cool water on his feverish nerves.

Furiously he drove on into the black depths of space. Buried somewhere in that measureless vacuum whirled the little planetoid, his goal. And in the very heart of it lay a cavern where he had found peace before, when his heart and brain were troubled beyond endurance as they were now.

An hour behind him lay Earth—and Brooke Loring. Brooke, with her laughing eyes and inviting lips. Brooke Loring, who cared not a tinker's damn for him! He knew that by the time he returned from Planetoid 88, if he ever did, she would be the wife of East Bayard—an important woman in the United Americas, mate of the man who was second in power of The Hun-

10