Still with that bright smile frozen on his lips, Kel Aran made a little mocking bow. "The robot's offer is flattering, Admiral." His soft low voice had the lilt of a song. "But I'm going to let him keep his star. And I hope the Emperor doesn't hold you responsible for letting us slip through your fingers!" Gugon Kul stood gasping, turning swiftly purple. "Now, Admiral," said Kel Aran, "I'm going to sing you a song, I call it the _Ballad of the Last Earthman_." And he began singing into the Admiral's startled face. His voice was clear and gay, and the tune had a swing that quickened the heart. The words told of his boyhood on the Earth, and his love for the Earth girl, Verel Erin; of the murder of the Earth, and his long search for his beloved; of his determination to continue the stellar quest, "Till I find her or I die!" The dark-flushed Admiral listened for a little while. Then he began shouting orders for the fleet to close in. He thought of something; his big hairy hand moved quickly; and the screen became a giddy blur. The stellar cloud now was close ahead. A faint green light pervaded it--the eerie green of mysterious _nebulium_, it was just strong enough to outline jagged plunging masses of stone spinning in inconceivable vortices. Brief explosive crimson flickerings, beyond, suggested the appalling vastness and power of the cloud. * * * * * The Admiral's cruisers were closing in behind, a double ring of scarlet flares. Blue flickered among them. And white stars burst out in a blinding swarm about us--meteoric fragments exploded by the rays. The big dark Saturnian looked gravely from his instruments to Kel. "Still, Kel," he said, "there's the shadow of a chance--if we turn back among them!" Kel Aran shook his yellow head, and his lips parted with a smile that welcomed danger. "No," he said again. "I'm taking over now." And his bright, reckless face turned to me. "Now, Barihorn!" he whispered, "If your life is eternal--" Then the dark sky behind and the pursuing crimson stars were blotted out. We were within the cloud! VII CIRCUS OF SPACE The lurid glow of death was shining all around us. Death rode down upon us on gigantic ragged boulders. Death shrieked at us from hurricanes of greenly incandescent gas, and tugged and battered at the ship. Death bathed us in rains of molten metal, and knocked upon the hull with a hail of meteoric fragments. And Kel Aran met death, and mocked it, with the same lilting song that he had sung the Admiral. He had taken the big Saturnian's place at the controls. His lean hands moved with a quickness I had never seen. And the twisting, spinning ship seemed to respond to the life and the rhythm of his song. As for my own life, I could not feel it at all eternal. The freaks of chance might have kept me alive a million years--but no chance, I felt, could pick a safe path through this insane chaos.