"Unless I'm much mistaken," thought Jerry, grimly, "I am on a ship which--be it alone or one of many in a convoy--is about to be attacked by those vessels out there." * * * * * A second later he knew he was right. From the approaching fleet there had come no sign of armament, no flash or flame or belch of smoke or blaze of ray, but the room he was in jolted violently, then canted crazily for a sick moment before righting itself. The alarm bells grew louder in their metallic clangor. Footsteps pounded down the corridor. The bare-to-the-waist man or another like him--Jerry could not distinguish between the creatures--came into the room shouting something. The surgeons shouted back and then the man raced out again. Another jolt made the room tremble, but this time it felt different, as though the room were built to take that sort of stress. Jerry recognized that his ship was in the process of firing back, with whatever strange weapons these fur-faces employed. Even as he reasoned this out, one of the enemy vessels on the screen shuddered, split into almost-matching halves and plunged beneath the waves amid much flame and confusion. The medics were not watching. One of them had moved out of Jerry's view and now stepped back into it, carrying the wriggling form of one of the animals from the cages. As Jerry watched, the animal, its orange teeth snapping vainly at those hard black fingertips on the medic's white-furred hands, was lashed to the table in the gray-smeared spot where its predecessor had perished. Then the bare-chested man was coming back into the room, wheeling a man on a cart. This one was missing fur from an arm and part of the chest area. Jerry was able to confirm his earlier theory that the hollowness of the creatures was extended throughout the flexible green body-sheaths. "Sonics," thought Jerry, all at once. "They're using sonic rays on each other. A good dose of heavy infravibration could _ruin_ a collodial creature! The loss of the fur through subsonic friction is only a side-effect. The main damage is the breakdown of those colloid organs when the beam focuses on a man." That would explain the way the other ship had simply sundered. Artificially induced metal-fatigue, by the application of controlled vibration. "Damn," thought Jerry, "this is _dangerous_!" Other alien vessels were visible now on that granulated "screen," heading away from the camera. At least Jerry's ship was not alone in the face of that armada. His ship was one of at least a dozen--with more, possibly, outside the pickup range of the camera--involved on his side of the battle. Some of them shattered silently apart and boiled into the churning waters with a violence so great that Jerry could "feel" the sound with his eyes.