2
------------------------------------------------------+
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece
Tom shot a hard right to his opponent's stomach 13
Tom swerved the jet car in front of the runaway truck 81
The men inside were tough-looking and steely-eyed 89
Tom saw that the Space Marines were watching the passengers very closely 137
"He's hanging on to the cleat over the main tube!" 185
"The projectiles blew Devers' ship into rocket dust!" 209
CHAPTER 1
"Bong-g-g! Bong-g-g! Bong-g-g!--"
With a hollow booming sound reminiscent of old eighteenth-and nineteenth-century clock towers, the electronic time tone rang out from the Tower of Galileo, chiming the hour of nine. As the notes reverberated over the vast expanse of Space Academy, U.S.A., the lights in the windows of the cadet dormitories began to wink out and the slidewalks that crisscrossed the campus, connecting the various buildings, rumbled to a halt. When the last mournful note had rolled away to die in the distant hills, the school was dark and still. The only movement to be seen was the slow pacing of the cadet watch officers, patrolling their beats; the only sound, the measured clicking of their boots on the metal strips of the slidewalks.
On the north side of the quadrangle near the Tower, a young watch officer paused in front of one of the dormitories and scanned the darkened windows of the durasteel and crystal building. Satisfied that all was in order, he continued on his lonely way. A moment later a shadowy figure rose out of the bushes opposite the dormitory entrance and stepped forward quickly and cautiously. Pausing on the slidewalk to stare after the disappearing watch officer, the figure was illuminated by the dim light from the entrance hall. He was a young man wearing the royal-blue uniform of a Space Cadet. Tall and wiry, with square features topped by a shock of