But even as she appeared, before a firing-stud could be pressed, the enemy craft almost disappeared again; or rather, she did not really appear at all, except as the veriest wraith of what a good, solid ship of space-alloy ought to be. She was a ghost ship, as unsubstantial as fog. Mist, tenuous, immaterial; the shadow of a shadow. A dream ship, built of the gossamer of dreams, manned by figments of horror recruited from sheerest nightmare. Not invisibility this time, Kinnison knew with a profound shock. Something else--something entirely different--something utterly incomprehensible. Xylpic had said it as nearly as it could be put into understandable words--the Boskonian ship was _leaving_, although it was standing still! It was monstrous--it _couldn't be done_! Then, at a range of only feet instead of the usual "point-blank" range of hundreds of miles, the tremendous secondaries of the _Dauntless_ cut loose. At such a ridiculous range as that--why, the screens themselves kept anything farther away from them than that ship was--they _couldn't_ miss. Nor did they; but neither did they hit. Those ravening beams went through and through the tenuous fabrication which should have been a vessel, but they struck nothing whatever. They went _past_--entirely harmlessly past--both the ship itself and the wraithlike but unforgettable figures which Kinnison recognized at a glance as Overlords of Delgon. His heart sank with a thud. He knew when he had had enough; and this was altogether too much. "Go free!" he rasped. "Give 'er the oof!" Energy poured into and through the great Bergenholm, but nothing happened; ship and contents remained inert. Not exactly inert, either, for the men were beginning to feel a new and unique sensation. Energy raved from the driving jets, but still nothing happened. There was none of the thrust, none of the reaction of an inert start; there was none of the lashing, quivering awareness of speed which affects every mind, however hardened to free flight, in the instant of change from rest to a motion many times faster than that of light. "Armor! Thought-screens! Emergency stations all!" Since they could not run away from whatever it was that was coming, they would face it. * * * * * And something was happening now, there was no doubt of that. Kinnison had been seasick and airsick and spacesick. Also, since cadets must learn to be able to do without artificial gravity, pseudo-inertia, and those other refinements which make space liners so comfortable, he had known the nausea and the queasily terrifying endless-fall sensations of weightlessness, as well as the even worse outrages of the sensibilities incident to inertialessness in its crudest, most basic applications. He thought that he was familiar with all the untoward sensations of every mode of travel known to science. This, however, was something entirely new.