Stan. Then the screen seemed to explode into light. Something flared like a nova in the sky. Intolerable brilliance filled a quarter of the screen—and faded. Swiftly. It went out. Stan drew a deep breath. "That," he said softly, "I think was a hundred thousand million horsepower in a power beam. I think our friends the grid makers have been working on armament to fight us with, and I think they've got something quite good! They don't like strangers. Torren was a stranger, and they got a shot at him, and they took it. And now they'll get set to come over here after us. If you'll excuse me, I'll go back to the drive!" He returned to the cabin where two out of a necessary eight graphite bars were in place. He worked. Fast. No man ever worked so fast or so fiercely or with such desperately steady hands. In twenty minutes he made the last, the final connection. And just as he dropped the hatch in place, Esther called anxiously: "More machines coming, Stan! The microphones pick them up!" "Coming!" he told her briskly. He went to the instrument board and threw switches here and there. "The normal thing," he said evenly, "would be to lift from the ground here, on landing drive, and go into field drive out of atmosphere. But we won't do it for two reasons. One is that we have no landing drive. The other is that at normal take-off acceleration, our friends of the grid would take a potshot at us with the thing they used on Rob Torren. With a hundred thousand million horsepower. So—here goes!" He stabbed a simple push button. With no perceptible interval and with no sensation of movement, the Erebus was out in deep space. The screens showed stars on every side—all the stars of the Galaxy. And these were not the hostile, immobile, unfriendly stars the first voyagers of space had seen. With the Bowdoin-Hall field collapsing forty times a second, the stars moved visibly. The nearer ones moved more swiftly and the farther ones more slowly, but all moved. The cosmos seemed very small and almost cosy, and the stars mere fireflies and the Rim itself no more than a few miles away from them. Stan watched. He said, "We're not making much time. Not over six hundred lights, I'd say. But we'll get there." "And—and when we do—" "H'm," said Stan. "You
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