That was a strange passage. There was no light, not even any glow of rare _nebulium_. There was only the pattern of unseen magnetic fields to guide us, only fancy to picture the dark walls of death beside us. Once a frightful hail of meteoric fragments, penetrating even the deflector fields, battered the tiny ship deafeningly. The guiding field-potentials had shifted since she passed, Verel said despairingly. We were lost in that sea of darkness. But Kel Aran took the controls, and brought us safely out of the meteor swarm. And the pale anxious girl, studying the dials, presently found her bearings again. The _Barihorn_ slipped ahead down that unseen passage. And at last there was light ahead! A dull-red, ominous glow. "See the red!" Verel whispered. "That is the zone of destroying radiation, that Malgarth set up to guard Mystoon. A spherical field of force. The black planet is within it." The crimson shone murkily through clouds of nebular dust. Dark rivers of hurtling stony fragments drew deadly curtains across it. But we came at last into the more open center of the nebula, and dropped toward that gigantic globe of somber red. "The force-field is a billion miles in diameter," Verel told us. "It acts to repulse or disintegrate all matter that approaches. Thus it serves to guard Mystoon from stray fragments of the nebula--as well as from such guests as ourselves!" "How can we pass it?" the Saturnian pilot asked. "The ships of Malgarth have coils that set up a neutralizing field," she told him. "The craft on which I escaped had such a unit. But I didn't learn the design. The only way is to hit it at full power. And hope!" "I don't know--" Jeron studied a row of dials, and shook his swarthy head. "From what the analyzers show, I don't know--" * * * * * Humming some gay ballad of space, the yellow-haired Earthman stepped lightly to the control bars. "I'll take over, Jeron," he said. "We've got to go through." A brief consultation with the girl, a hasty check of field-intensities, and he called to Rogo Nug to push his converters to full power. The whole ship sang to the musical hum of the engines, and the _Barihorn_ plunged toward that crimson ball. It expanded before us, against the dark angry clouds of the nebula, like the glowing sphere of some giant sun. And its barrier forces, I knew, could be as deadly as the incandescent gases of a Betelgeuse or an Antares! The Earthman stood crouched grimly over the controls. The last girl of Earth stood close beside him, one hand trembling on his shoulder. "We may not pass," her soft voice husked. "But if we must die--the last hope of man--then I would have it this way.--Even in death, there can be a victory." And her voice joined then, with his, in the chorus of that rollicking, picaresque ballad of space.