There was no answer. Then, suddenly, every sound-producing device in the ship abruptly emitted a hoarse and monstrous noise. The lights flashed up and circuit-breakers cut them off. The nearby-object horn squawked. The hull-temperature warning squealed. The ship's internal gravity-field tugged horribly for an instant and went off. Every device within the ship designed to notify emergency clanged or shrieked or roared or screamed. There was a momentary bedlam. It lasted for part of a second only. Then everything stopped. There was no weight within the ship, and there were no lights, and there was dead silence, and Murgatroyd made whimpering sounds in the darkness. Calhoun thought absurdly to himself, "_According to the book, this is an unfavorable chance consequence of something or other._" But it was more than an unfavorable chance occurrence. It was an intentional and drastic and possibly a deadly one. "Somebody's acting up," said Calhoun measuredly, in the blackness. "What's the matter with them?" He flipped the screen switch to bring back vision of what was outside. The vision screens of a ship are very carefully fused against over-load burnouts, because there is nothing in all the cosmos quite as helpless and foredoomed as a ship which is blind in the emptiness of space. But the screens did not light again. They couldn't. The cutouts hadn't worked in time. Calhoun's scalp crawled. But as his eyes adjusted, he saw the palely fluorescent handles of switches and doors. They hadn't been made fluorescent in expectation of an emergency like this, of course, but they would help a great deal. He knew what had happened. It couldn't be but one thing--a landing-grid field clamped on the fifty-ton Med Ship with the power needed to grasp and land a twenty-thousand-ton liner. At that strength it would paralyze every instrument and blow every cut-off. It could not be accident. The reception of the news of his identity, the repeated request that he identify himself, and then the demand that he wait--This murderous performance was deliberate. "Maybe," said Calhoun in the inky-black cabin, "as a Med Ship our arrival is an unfavorable chance consequence of something--or the unfavorableness is--and somebody means to keep us from happening. It looks like it." Murgatroyd whimpered. "And I think," added Calhoun coldly, "that somebody may need a swift kick in the negative feedback!"