"I think," the Earthman interrupted his song, "that the Admiral will not care to follow us here--not even for Malgarth's star!" Jeron Roc stood rigidly by, clinging to a hand rail against the wild lurching of the ship. I saw Zerek Oom, the fat, tattooed cook, standing startled and petrified at the end of the corridor. I saw him again, after Kel Aran had earned another trick from death, and now all his tattooing had a background of sickly green. I looked again, and he was swaying aft at an unsteady run, toward the lavatory. Some iron fragment must have struck the hull, despite all the well-tried skill of Kel Aran, for it rang like a great bell and the little ship began to spin end over end. I clung with both sweating hands to the rail, and felt as ill as Zerek Oom. When the ship was steadier again, I tried to go back to my bunk, and stumbled headlong in the corridor. Jeron came to help me, and then made me take another dose of his bitter, nauseating medicine. "I've lived a million years," I gasped, "without you to doctor m--" The walls about me rang to another fearful crash, and the ship began to spin again. A blistering heat was creeping through the insulated hull. The air was stifling. I felt the faint, deadly sting of some penetrating radiation. And then a great hand of darkness extinguished all my spinning, tortured world. The next I knew, the _Barihorn_ was humming smoothly again through the dark vault of stars. The coiling nightmare cloud was already lost behind. We had emerged from one of its spiral arms, Kel Aran informed me, at right angles from the direction of our entrance. "Old Gugon Kul tried to patrol all the borders of the cloud. But that would have spread a hundred fleets too wide. Anyhow, he wasn't looking for us to come out alive." "So he thinks we're dead?" Relieved, I sat up on the bunk. "He won't be hunting us any more?" But big Zerek Oom came waddling out of his galley, wiping his fat tattooed hands on a white apron, to rid me of that comforting illusion. "Worse luck, Barihorn," he sighed, with a sad look at Kel Aran, "Indeed the Admiral believed us lost. He called the offices of the Corporation--we picked up the message on the telescreen--and reported that we had perished in the cloud. And the reply was relayed from black Mystoon--from the unknown lair of Malgarth himself--that the reward of a stellar system would be duly paid for the death of the Falcon." "Well?" I said. "What's wrong with that?" * * * * * The round pale eyes of Zerek Oom looked reproachfully at the Earthman. "Kel tapped his communicator again," he told me. "Boasted that we had got away. And that you, Barihorn, the man who made Malgarth a million years ago, were with him. And sang that song of the last Earthman again, until the Admiral was blue in the face!" I looked at Kel Aran. "The Admiral must have been furious, about the reward," I said. "He'll hunt us harder than ever."