_January 21--All hands and passengers in good health, but God help us, booster reading: zero-zero. By radio we have learned that our sister ship, the Andromeda, is also without auxiliary power and adrift. Such a dual catastrophe would certainly argue for something other than coincidence._ _Our charts show an asteroid of sizeable proportions to lie approximately midway between the two ships. Under ordinary circumstances I would order the lifeboats run out at once and attempt to reach this planetoid, hoping that by some miracle it will be capable of supporting life. But the circumstances are far from ordinary._ _We sighted them at 4:30 P.M., Earth-time, a few moments after the booster went dead and the ship lost steerageway. Absorbers! They hover out there in space, clearly visible through the ports, waiting for us to open the airlock. There are two of them, but even as I write, one has turned and with unfailing accuracy has headed in the direction of the Andromeda._ _Absorbers! What a world of myth and legend surrounds them. Are they organic or inorganic? I do not know. I only know they have been mortally feared by sailors since the first rocket blasted through Earth's orbit. They are what their name implies: devourers of life, with the peculiar, apparently meaningless power of transforming themselves into a physical facsimile of their victims._ _One of them is out there now, swirling lazily like a miasmic cloud of saffron dust...._ Cap handed the book to Raine who read it and handed it back without comment. And at that moment Cap saw the kid in his true light: a cold-blooded extrovert who was interested in the ship only for what he could get out of her. Next day, without asking permission, Raine began the task of dismantling the _Perseus_. He knew he had a potential fortune at his fingertips, for every portable object he could transport back to Earth or Venus would bring a high price from curio-hungry antique hunters. For a week he worked almost unceasingly at the salvage operation. He unscrewed the ship's nameplate and made a little plush box for it. He took down the dials of the cosmoscope, the astrolog and other smaller instruments and made them ready for shipment. He stripped out the entire intercom mechanism, the old-fashioned lighting fixtures, to say nothing of the furniture and personal effects which hadn't spoiled by time.