Channok was inspecting the door. This was the first indication that there had been any violence connected with whatever had happened on the _Ra-Twelve_. The door had been locked from without and literally ripped open from within by a stream of incandescence played on it by a gun held probably not much more than a foot away. That woman had wanted out in an awful hurry! Peer came over to watch him. He couldn't quite read her expression, but he had a notion she wanted to bawl. "Let's take a quick look at the rest of it and get back to the _Asteroid_," he suggested, somewhat disturbed himself. "We ought to talk this over." The one remaining cabin lay just beyond the point where the passage angled back into the ship. There was light in that one, too, and the door was half open. Channok got there first and pushed it open a little farther. Then he stood frozen in the door-frame for a moment. "What's stopping you?" Peer inquired impatiently, poking his ribs from behind. He stepped back into the passage, pulled the door shut all the way, scooped her up and heaved her to his shoulder. His space-boots felt like iron anchors as he clunk-clunked hastily back through the passages to the derelict's lock. There was nothing definite to run from any more; but he knew now what had happened on the _Ra-Twelve_, and he felt nightmare pacing after him all the way. He crossed to the _Asteroid's_ control room lock in a jump, without bothering with his jets. * * * * * "Close the outer lock!" he told Peer hoarsely, reaching up for the switch marked "Decontaminant" above him. A fourfold spray of yellowish Killall was misting the trapped air in the lock about them an instant later. "What was it?" Peer's voice came out of the fog. "Antibiotic," Channok said, his scalp still crawling. "What you--what voyageurs call a lich, I think. I don't know that kind. But it got the guy in that last cabin." The occupant of the last cabin had looked as if somebody had used a particularly vicious sort of acid gun on him, which somehow had missed damaging his clothing. To the grisly class of life-forms that produced that effect, an ordinary spacesuit offered exactly no resistance. "A lich can't last more than an hour or so in space, Channy," Peer's voice came shakily after a pause. "It's a pretty awful way to get it, but that stuff over there must have been dead for a long time now." "I know," said Channok. He hesitated, and then cut off the Killall spray and started the blowers to clear the lock. "I guess I just panicked for a moment. But I'm going to go over that ship with decontaminant before we do any more investigating! And meanwhile you'd better get in a few hours of sleep!" "Wouldn't hurt any," Peer agreed. "How do you suppose the lich got on board?"