Curt coaxed the last bit of power from his rockets, sent his ship in a spiralling drive for free space. He smiled thinly, grimly, when the tossing of the cruiser lessened. He glanced from the vision port, wondering if they would get free. * * * * * A smashing blow struck the ship, drove it back, set metal to singing. Curt swore harshly. Space was filled with floating debris captured by the gravitic tides. Small chunks of meteoric rock flashed by, followed by clouds of dust as fine as gravel. The bloated, ruptured body of a space-ship rushed by in the opposite direction, hurled nowhere in its constant swinging about the area of dead space. Curt winced, when he caught the starshine on the bulgered bodies that trailed in its wake like a meteor cloud. He wondered, irrelevantly, who the men were. And then from the darkness of space came a great sweeping clot of debris, the gutter rubbish of the space lanes. Ships that had been caught in the tides, meteors, rocks, all the flotsam that had been gathered through the ages. But Curt had no time for that. He felt his ship winning free, sent it whipping to the left again, wondering if his rockets would burn out under the stupendous strain. And relief filled him, when he realized that he was pulling the other ship from its death-bed of gravity. And even as he laughed, he felt all power cease in his ship. He swore brittlely, fought with the controls. All of them were dead. Panicky, he stared from the vision port, and dull wonder filled his mind. Twin tractor-beams were lancing from the clot of space debris below the ship, each centered on a different ship. The beams were almost white in their intensity, so great was their power. "What the hell!" Curt Varga said audibly, relaxed momentarily. And then the cruiser was hurtling toward the clot, sucked there by the tractor beam, moved with an incredible titanic force such as was only possible from a mighty generator. Curt swerved his gaze to the freighter, saw that it, too, was trapped. He thought then of the words that his brother had spoken to him on Mars before, of the information that had come through about the base of the drug-smuggling ring being in the Sargasso. He cursed the utter blind stupidity that had made him discount the words even as they were spoken. And then puzzlement grew within him, for it was an established fact that, once caught within the Sargasso, nothing could escape. How, then, could this be the _smothalene_ smuggling headquarters; the smuggling ships could not escape the drag of the knitted gravities? But he had no more time for thinking. The cruiser jarred squarely into the center of the clot of debris, was sucked through it. Metal jarred and strained, and a light flickered into life on the board, indicating that a plate had been sprung in number Three hold.