meter showed a reading that made fresh sweat come out on Borden's face.

But the ports stayed black. Absolutely any form of energy striking the feed-back field outside would be neutralized. No light would be reflected. Any detector-field would be exactly canceled, as if nothing whatever existed where the Danaë hurtled onward some few hundred miles above the planet's surface.

The Danaë, at the moment, was in the position of having made a hole about itself to crawl into. But it couldn't use its drive. It couldn't see out. It was hiding in blackness of its own creation, like a cuttlefish in its own ink.

"Dee," Ellen Borden asked her husband in a shaky voice, "what happened?"

"Something threw a heat-ray at us," said Borden. He mopped his forehead. "We should have exploded to incandescent gas. But our feed-back field stopped it. The heat-ray cut off when we should have been destroyed—and so did our field, so there we were again! And so we got a second beaming. But now we aren't. At least we appear not to be. So we can live until we crash."

Sattell said in a suddenly high-pitched voice, "How long will that be?"

"I don't know the gravity," Borden told him. "But it does take time to fall four hundred miles. We have some velocity, too. It's under orbital speed but it'll help. I'm going to figure something out."

He swung in the control-chair and hit keys on the computer. The size of the white spot. It had all turned silvery, then all of it had flamed. Why? The amount of power in the heat-ray—a rough guess. Nobody could have figures on what a ship's tanks would yield on short-circuit, but the field had had to neutralize some hundreds of megawatts of pure heat.

The amount of overlap—the size of the heat-ray itself—was another guess and a wild one. And why had all of the white spot spat flame? Every bit of it? Three hundred miles by an average of sixty.... Even at low power—

The computer clicked.

"Sun-power," Borden said grimly, after a moment. "That figures out just about right. Not more than a kilowatt to the square yard, but eighteen thousand square miles has plenty of square yards! We've been on the receiving end of a sun-mirror heat-ray, and if it had been accurately figured we'd have fried." Then he said, "But a sun-mirror doesn't work at night!"

He 

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