black outside. The lights in the ship dimmed down to mere dull-red glows.

There was silence.

The ports showed blackness. The drive, of course, ceased to operate. The ship had sealed itself in a shell of screening, through which nothing at all could penetrate, but which drew upon the ship's power-tanks for as much energy as it neutralized outside. And the drain was so great that the interior lights were dim red spots and not lights at all.

For five heart-beats the blackness persisted while the four in the ship stayed frozen.

The feed-back screen cut off. Again they saw the planet below. The white patch once more was white, instead of flame. But as they looked, the silvery look spread out all over it in glittering ripples, and they seemed to look into the heart of a sun's ravening furnaces before the feed-back screen came into existence for their defense. The ports were blacked out again.

The ship hurtled on toward emptiness. It was blind. It was helpless.

Borden moved an emergency light to shine on the output meter. The needle was fast against the pin. The feed-back screen was not only drawing maximum safe power. It was working on an effective short circuit of the ship's entire power supply. Busbars carrying that current would be heating up. They would melt at any instant.

Borden's fingers moved swiftly. He set up a shunt for on-switch operation of the feed-back field.

He threw the last cross-over tumbler and waited, with sweat beading his forehead. Something had flung a beam of pure heat-energy at the Danaë. It should have volatized the small space-craft immediately, but it had been left on for four seconds.

When it ended, the feed-back screen cut off, too. Then the Danaë had been detected a second time and the planetary weapon used again. Now, with the feed-back field on-switch instead of relay, if the heat ray turned off again the feed-back field wouldn't, and the Danaë should be indetectable to anything but a permeability probe. The space-ship would seem to have been destroyed, if the heat-beam went off before the ship's power failed.

It did. A relay clicked somewhere, cut a current flow of some tens of thousands of amperes. The lights inside the ship flashed to full brightness. Borden's eyes flicked to the power-meters. The operational power-tank meter read zero. The emergency reserve power-tank 

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