The telescreen shimmered again, and showed a wide black rectangle of space. The Sun was a sharp white disk, and the stars were an unfamiliar pattern--nearly all the constellations I had known had dissolved in a million years of change. And there was a little cluster of crimson points that crept among the rest. "Half the Twelfth Sector Fleet," muttered Kel Aran. "Six hundred cruisers--after us!" He called Jeron Roc from his bunk. They held a swift consultation. Technical terms were confusing to me. But I understood that the space-contraction drive of the _Barihorn_ gave our craft the advantage in maneuverability; and that the newer cosmical repulsion drive of the Admiral's cruisers, while it left them a little clumsier about getting under way, gave them by far the greater ultimate speed. "We can keep ahead for a time," the Saturnian admitted apprehensively. "But in the end they can run us down. And every cruiser carries a hundred patrol boats that is our equal in fighting power.--It was simply a mistake to stay and search so long." "No," the Earthman insisted stubbornly. "We must find Verel Erin." He consulted the charts--reels of transparent film viewed through a stereoscopic magnifier which gave a three-dimensional image of the array of worlds in space. He rapped swift commands into the ship's phones. The hull drummed to the swift rhythm of the engines. The Sun diminished to a yellow point behind, and was lost amid greater luminaries. But the red stars of the fleet grew brighter, and they spread ever wider across the black of space. Jeron stood like a grim dark statue over the controls. "Kel," he called, in a deep grave voice, "there's an area of cosmic storm ahead. They're spreading out, trying to hem us against that. I think we had better double back--there's one chance in a million--" "No," said Kel Aran. "Follow the course I gave you." On the telescreen, the navigator showed me the storm. Against the familiar panorama of space; the velvety blackness, the hard changeless many-hued atoms of stars, the nebulous dust of silver--against that stark eternal beauty sprawled an ugly cloud. It was many-armed, like an octopus of darkness, and it flickered with a weird angry green. "There it is," said the Saturnian. "A condensation of matter so tenuous and vast that its gravitational energies never gathered it into a star. A true cosmic storm!" Awe deepened his voice. "Tempests of incandescent gas. Rain of molten metal. Hail of meteoric fragments, Lightning of atomic energy.--And Kel commands me to drive straight into it!" The crimson stars behind were brighter, now. Lines of them spread out, to right and to left, above and below--as if to herd us into the storm. And among them flashed points of ominous blue. The blue points were barytron beams, I knew. Jets of barytron particles--the mysterious heavy "X-particles" of the physics of my own day--they could reach out to smash the very atoms in a target a million miles away.