We ran. I put my arm around the girl as she sagged like a terrified child against me. Bow and stern, the sounds of the fighting seemed somewhat to have slackened. The passengers still were screaming; I shoved them back in their doorways as we dashed past. And suddenly, reaching the side deck, I realized that the towering Blake was not with us. The deck here was wet with blood. Three or four bodies lay nearby. An Earth-woman lay writhing, her white throat slashed with crimson. There was nothing I could do to help her. My gun ranged the deck; there was nothing to shoot at. Off at the stern, I saw a running man leap high in the air and go down. Then the red Earth-light back there momentarily darkened. Someone had thrown a darkness bomb; its light-absorbing gas came spreading along the deck toward us. "This way, Nina--climb. I'll follow." We went up the little ladder. Near the top I held her back, poking my head cautiously up, in advance of her. The dimly starlit deck was blurred with gas and heat fumes. We were mid-forward, perhaps halfway between the helio cubby and the chart room. In a patch here on the deck, darkness gas hung in a layer, a black shroud nearly waist deep. Light still showed in the window of the helio room, where the grewsome body of Len Smith lay sprawled. The chart room was dark, its door closed; but the steel shutter of its window, facing this way, was up a few inches. I thought I saw the muzzle of a gun protruding. Good enough. Mackensie, Wilson and perhaps others were in there--barricaded, still holding out. I shouted, "I'm Penelle. Don't fire!" "Come ahead," Mackensie's great voice roared. * * * * * Life, or death, can hang upon such a little thing. Directly across the thirty-foot roof deck from me the top of the other side-ladder was visible above the layer of darkness. A man's head and shoulders suddenly appeared there. My weapon leveled; but then I saw that it was Nina's father. He saw me at the same instant, waved at me and jumped from the ladder, wading through the waist-high darkness toward the chart room. I do feel that there was nothing I could have done. Heaven knows I would give anything now if only I had had some flash of intuition. But I was thinking only of Nina. I turned to gaze down at her, where she stood a step or two below me on the ladder. "Come on, it's all safe." Safe? I turned back just in time to see a hand and arm come up out of the layer of darkness. Weird, as though detached from its body, it swung; the fingers loosed a little globe. It was only a few feet behind Blake. The globe hurtled at his head, struck it--an explosive bomb. It burst with a sharp report and a little puff of yellow-red light. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of the ghastly scattered fragments of what had been a human head. There was only a grewsome gory neck-stump as the giant body of Blake toppled down into the layer of darkness.