Edmond Hamilton 
Fugitive of the Stars 

Horne, the spaceship’s pilot, had been warned. ‘Don’t forget the meteor swarm.’ And Horne’s directional calculations for the Vega Queen’s course took that advice into account; the spaceship would go fifteen thousand miles out of its way to avoid those deadly celestial rocks. But when Horne went off duty, he felt himself numbed by a curious druglike leadenness. And the next thing he knew, he was in a lifeboat, speeding away from the floating wreckage of the Vega Queen. Eighteen survivors out of one hundred and fifty-three passengers. And each one in the tiny space shell believed Horne responsible…deliberate negligence, calculated destruction… Someone had drugged Horne, he knew; someone had tampered with the ship to alter its course. But who? And for what cosmic purpose?