The clanging alarm reminded him that time was dangerously short. Soon the tanks would let go; he couldn't afford to be near the doomed freighter when the exploding fuel did its work. Without glancing back, he shut the entrance port, pressed the button that collapsed the escape tube, and took his place at the glowing controls of the little vessel. The _Cinnabar's_ death knell was muffled now. Like a tocsin of the dead, it rang dully in his ears as he reached for the levers. But confidence returned as he felt the familiar handles beneath him. The life ship was complete, self-sufficient. Charts were reduced to a simple form, instruments were direct-reading, course plotting almost automatic, so that the commonest spaceman could navigate the tender at need. He had himself operated it during the _Cinnabar's_ emergency landing a month ago. He punched the internal-combustion engines into life, watched the generator output mount, then cut in a weak repulsion field. With a lurch the little ship tore free from its parent vessel and retreated from the long, gleaming shape of the freighter. He switched over to the space-induction field coils. Power thrummed in the depths of the tiny craft; it swerved about and obediently plunged ahead, fleeing the coming tragedy. After ten minutes at full field he turned it around and held it motionless in space with respect to the now distant _Cinnabar_. The slim freighter, gleaming gold in the light of the distant sun, seemed to float upon a soft, star-sprinkled darkness. There was no trace of movement, although she was still flying, with untended engines, at three-quarters field. He bit his lips, waiting. Then, soundlessly, catastrophe struck! * * * * * From amidships flowered a terrible, consuming blossom of blue-white flame, a petalled fire that engulfed the _Cinnabar_ from bow to stem and limned itself fantastically against the velvet heavens behind. Streamers of white-hot gas, sunlike in intensity, burst and flared in the brief glory of destruction, then as swiftly collapsed upon themselves, dimmed to the lesser glow of molten metal. The _Cinnabar_, a slender, white-hot needle, broke into a thousand dripping fragments, droplets of fire spattering the sky. Akars chuckled uneasily, swore, rubbed his ear with the back of a hand. That was that. Somewhere in the swirling, far-flung wreckage he must find the tiny block of unbelievably heavy, practically indestructible Urulium, flung out of the shattered strong room which he could have penetrated in no other way. The explosion should have released the treasure and wiped out all evidence against him at the same time. Like the rest of his plan it was simple, direct, foolproof.