Free Stalking the Nightmare by Harlan Ellison Page A

her arm tightly. She ground her lips together as his fingers closed about the skin, and he replied, “They got me on a thousand yearer to Io, lady. So I want to do any goddam thing that’ll get me out of here. Now what ship are you assigned to snap?”
    She seemed to shrug her shoulders in finality, having made a token gesture, and answered, “I’m snap on the Lady Knoxmaster, in pit eighty-four.”
    “Then let’s go,” he finished, and dragged her off across the field.
    “You don’t want to do this,” she said again, softly. He was deaf to her warning.

    When the invership took off, straight up without clearance coordinates and at full power, the Port Central went crazy, sending up signals, demanding recognition info, demanding this, demanding the other. But the Lady Knoxmaster was already heading out toward snap-point.
    Akisimov, gloating, threw in the switch and knew the telemetering cameras were on him. “Goodbye, you asses! Goodbye, from Rike Akisimov! Stupid! You thought I’d spend a thousand years on Io? There are better things for me in the universe!”
    He flicked off, to let them call the sykops, so the law would know he had bested them. “Yeah, there isn’t anything worse than a life term on Io,” he murmured, watching the planet fall away in the viewplates.
    “You’re wrong, Akisimov,” the girl murmured, very, very softly.
    Immediately the sykops and the SpaceCom sent up ships to apprehend the violator, but it was obvious the ship had enough start momentum to reach snap-out—if a Driver was on board—before they could reach it. Their single hope was that Akisimov had no Driver aboard, then they could catch him in a straight run.
    On board the Lady Knoxmaster, Akisimov studied the calm-faced psioid girl in the other accelocouch.
    Drivers were the most valuable, and yet the simplest-talented, of all the types of psionically equipped peoples in the field. Their one capacity was to warp a ship from normal space into that not-space that allowed interstellar travel; into inverspace.
    Though the ship went through—set to snap-out by an automatic function of the Driver’s psi faculty—the Driver did not. That was the reason they were always in-suit and ready for the snap. Since they did not snap when the ship did, they were left hanging in space, where they were picked up immediately after by a doggie vessel assigned to each takeoff.
    But this time there was no doggie, and there was no suit, and Akisimov wanted the girl dead in any event. He might have made some slip, might have mumbled something about where “out there” he was heading. But whether he had or had not, dead witnesses were the only safe witnesses.
    “Snap the ship,” he snarled at her, aiming the blaster.
    “I’m unsuited,” she replied.
    “Snap, damn your lousy psi hide! Snap damn you, and pray the cops on our trail will get to you before you conk out What is it, seven seconds you can survive in space? Ten? Whatever it is, it’s more of a chance than if I burn your head off!” He indicated with a sweep of his slim hand the console port where the bips that were sykop ships were narrowing up at them.
    “You don’t want to do this,” the girl tried again.
    Akisimov blasted. The gun leaped in his palm, and the stench of burned-away flesh filled the cabin. The girl stared dumbly at the cauterized stump that had been her left arm. A scream started to her mouth, but he silenced her with the point of the blaster.
    She nodded acquiescence.
    She snapped. Though she could not explain what was going on in her mind, she knew what she was doing, and she concentrated to do it this time … though just a bit differently … just a bit specially. She drew down her brows and concentrated, and …
    blank…
    The ship was gone, she was in space, whirling, senseless, as the bulk of a ship loomed around her, hauling her in.
    She was safe. She would live. With one arm.
    As the charcoal-caped sykops dragged her in, lay her in a mesh webbing,