Brand Haggard's blond head bobbed into view only fifteen feet away. He stood up from the firing lever and stared through the bridge port at Larry. This was the first time Larry had ever seen him when he was not grinning that arrogant wicked grin of his. * * * * * Haggard was shaking his fist and yelling. His gun was useless now. And he knew only too well what lay in Larry's mind: To carry him dead into the _Astral_ and pile the _Martian_ up like a racing car striking a brick wall! The captain of the black vessel tried every strategy he knew. But Larry held it down to the course he had set. The two ships flashed on toward destruction. Haggard's face showed in the glass, threatening, cajoling, pleading. At the last moment he held up two fist-fulls of paper money, trying to buy another chance. Larry laughed and dropped his hand on the magnet lever. Screams of terror built up within the _Friar Bacon_ as the crew discovered the derelict dead ahead. They were drowned under the roar of rockets as Larry cut the pirate loose and moved to avoid the _Astral_. He had a horrible moment of watching a fin on the wrecked vessel reach out to rake the belly of the slewing salvage ship. Then all dissolved in a shower of wreckage, the fin crumpling away and flames shooting up where it had been. The _Martian_ had crumpled up like an accordion. Bodies flew past the windows, to explode as the pressureless atmosphere inflated them. Gold ingots mingled with them. Everywhere there was death, and the horror that can come only from a wreck of two such space-giants as the _Martian_ and the long-dead _Astral_. The _Friar_ toppled end over end, a chip caught in a maelstrom. Miles away from the carnage, Larry Wolfe managed to right it. He stood up from the controls to find Ann Holland standing white and silent above Carlyle's body. Larry shuddered. Carlyle's face was that of a mummy. His hands were crooked brown hooks like the dried talons of a buzzard. His uniform draped his shrivelled body like a gunny sack over a skeleton. Ann pressed against Larry's side, seemingly unconscious that there had ever been anything wrong between them. "What was he, Larry?" she whispered. "I don't know," he admitted. "But he was old--Lord knows how old. That crystal heart he gave you ... there was something queer about it. I think that when I destroyed it, I killed him, too." The girl suddenly buried her face against his chest. "Oh, Larry!" she sobbed. "It's so horrible. Let's go back ... now!" "Just as soon as we comb a few gold bars out of the sky," he told her softly. "Then we're going back and carry on with those plans we had before you gave me back my ring. But--I'd like to find out some time--just how old he was, and _what_ he was." * * * * *