highway. He might expect to make a deal with our enemies by selling us out. Even if they killed him out of hand, the fact that he was an alien would make them hunt for us. So he could figure that he might make friends, but even if he didn't he would be sure to ruin us. A win for him either way."

Ellen paled a little. "And the drive's pulled down and Jerry's gone."

"So there's nothing to do but wait and see," said Borden.

He tried to work on the space-drive. All its parts were spread out on the drive room floor. When they'd repaired it before, it had been so thoroughly fused that a part looked good even if repaired to the accuracy of a bent wax candle straightened out by hand.

Now the repairs looked very bad. It seemed incredible that anything so clumsily made should have worked. But Borden couldn't keep his mind on it.

"Just on the off chance, Ellen," he said abruptly, "you will not leave the ship by yourself. We'd better replace the lock-door fastening, too. If we do have visitors from the city on the white spot, that won't stop them. But it might keep them from taking us off-guard."

He opened the thief-proof locker where an essential part of the lock-catch had been stored, to protect it from Sattell. It had a combination fastening, intended merely to prevent pilfering when the ship was in a space-port.

Borden reached in. Then he went completely and terribly white.

"He's got the star charts and the log! He got in here somehow!"

This was the ultimate in disaster. Because space is trackless. At fifty light years from Earth the Milky Way is still plain, of course, but the constellations have ceased to be. At a hundred light years one is lost. At a thousand light years—and the Danaë had passed that point months ago—a ship in space is in much the position of a canary whose universe has consisted of a cage in a single room, and has escaped out a window into the wide, wide world.

A space-ship has to keep an infinitely precise log of bearings run and distances traveled in all three dimensions. It must make photographic star charts. And the accuracy of all its records must be perfect if it is to find the place it left nearly enough for the stars to become familiar again so it can locate the Solar System—barely four light hours in span.

"I 

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