Kim reached over and pulled out a switch.

"That's the wristlet relay switch," he told Dona. "We stay here until you come back—even if a fighting-beam hits us. You've got to go on board that monster and get some fuel and, if you can, a hafnium catalyzer. If another battleship's around and comes up—you drive the Starshine home with what fuel you can get. We'll be dead, but you do that. You hear?"

"I'll—hurry, Kim," Dona said.

"Be careful!" commanded Kim fiercely. "There shouldn't be a man on that ship who can move, but be careful!"

She kissed him quickly and closed the face-plate of her helmet. She went into the airlock and closed the inner door.

There was silence in the Starshine. Kim sweated. The outer airlock door opened. The two ships were actually touching. The clumping of the magnetic shoes of Dona's space-suit upon the other ship's hull was transmitted to the Starshine.

Kim and the Mayor of Steadheim heard the clankings as she opened the other ship's outer airlock door—the inner door. Then they heard nothing.

Dona was in an enemy space-ship, unarmed. Subjects of the Empire of Greater Sinab manned it. They or their fellows had murdered half the population of the banded planet below. They were helpless, now, to be sure, held immobile by fields maintained by the precariously turning engines of the Starshine.

But the fuel-gauge showed the fuel-tanks absolutely dry. The Starshine was running on fuel in the pipe-line and catalyzers. It had been for an indefinite time. Its engines would cut off at any instant.

When the lights flickered Kim groaned. This meant that the last few molecules of fuel were going from the catalyzer. He feverishly cut off the heaters which kept the ship warm in space. He cut off the air-purifier.

He became desperately economical of every watt of energy. He used power for the disciplinary-circuit beams which kept the enemy crew helpless and for the grapples which kept the two ships in contact—for nothing else.

But still the lights flickered. The engines gasped for power. They started and checked and ran again, and again checked.

The second they failed finally, the immobile monster alongside would become a ravening engine of destruction. The two men in the Starshine would die in an 

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