them back in pails.

What was it Gus had said about them burrowing into metal just like chiggers burrow into human flesh?

Chiggers attacked humans to lay their eggs. Maybe ... maybe....

A battalion of the bugs trooped across the face of an indicator and Meek saw they were smaller than the ones he had seen back on Gus' rock.

There was no doubt about it. They were young bugs. Bugs that has just hatched out. Thousands of them ... millions of them, maybe! And they wouldn't be in the instruments and controls alone, but all through the ship. They'd be in the motors and the firing mechanisms ... all the places where the best alloys were used.

Meek wrung his hands, watching them play tag across the panel. If they'd had to hatch, why couldn't they have waited. Just until the game was over, anyhow. That would have been all he'd asked. But they hadn't and here he was, with a couple of million bugs or so right smack in his lap.

The rocket flared again and the ships shot out.

Bitterness chewing at him, Meek flung the ship out savagely. What did it matter what happened now. Gus would take the hide off him, rheumatism or no rheumatism, as soon as he found out about the bugs.

For a wild moment, he hoped he would crack up. Maybe the ship would fall apart like some of the others had. Like the old one hoss shay the poet had written about centuries ago. The ship had lost so many plates that even now it was like flying a space-going box-kite.

Suddenly a ship loomed directly ahead, diving from the zenith. Meek, forgetting his half-formed hope of a crackup a second before, froze in terror, but his fingers acted by pure instinct, stabbing at keys. Although in the petrified second that seemed half an eternity, Meek knew the ships would crash before he even touched the keys. And even as he thought it, the ship ducked in a nerve-rending jerk and they were skinning past, hulls almost touching. Another jerk and more plates gone and there was the ball, directly ahead, with the repulsor beam already licking out.

Meek's jaw fell and a chill ran through his body and he couldn't move a muscle. For he hadn't even touched the trigger and yet the repulsor beam was flaring out, driving the ball ahead of it while the ship twisted and squirmed its way through a mass of fighting craft.

 Prev. P 24/28 next