For a moment Cap stood there, drinking in the scene: his golf course spread out in the blue light like a big carpet and in the center of it the black cigar-shaped _Perseus_. There was something virile about that antiquated ship, something different from the _Andromeda_ he had seen through scope. It was as if the _Perseus_ were all masculine, while the _Andromeda_ were its daintier feminine counterpart. And then Raine touched the trigger. There was an ellipse of yellow flame, a mushroom of white smoke and a dull roar. Cap was flung backward by the shockwave. The hills fielded the explosion, flung it back, and the thunder went grumbling over the countryside. In the empty silence that followed, Cap's wrist watch ticked off the passing minutes. The moonlight returned from behind a passing cloud, to reveal Raine by the Dofield defender, binoculars to his eyes. Time snailed by. The night was passing. And then the roar came again, this time from above. Cap saw a great cylindrical shadow slanting down from the sky. The _Andromeda_ struck far out on the flat beyond the house. It struck with a crash of grinding metal and crumbling girders. For an instant after that a hush fell over everything. And then from the _Perseus_ in the golf course came a sound, low at first, growing louder and louder. To Cap it sounded like a moan of anguish, of hatred and despair that seemed to issue from a hundred throats. The _Perseus_ trembled, began to move. Cap stared. The ship moved on its belly across the fairway. Like a timeless juggernaut it entered the flat and slid out across the tableland toward the crumpled wreckage of its sister vessel. Raine twisted about as he heard the thunder of that advancing hulk. Fear and disbelief contorted his face. He uttered a cry, leaped from the mount of the Dofield and began to run wildly across the flat. For an instant Cap thought he was going to reach the first low hillock that led to higher ground and safety. But Cap had reckoned without the terrific drive of that vessel. Was it the Absorber--that strange creature of outer space--which had transposed its own inexplicable life into the shell of the dismantled _Perseus_ and now _was_ that ship _alive_ with all the ship's hates, joys and sorrows? Organic into inorganic--a transmutation of a supernormal life into a materialistic structure of metal ... cosmic metempsychosis too tremendous for the finite mind to grasp. The _Perseus_ came on, bowling across the flat like a monster of metal gone mad, grinding over rock outcrop and gravel, throwing up a thick cloud of dust. It came on with a terrible fixation of purpose, with a relentless compulsion that knew no halting. It met and engulfed the helpless figure of Clarence Raine and a cry of mingled hate and triumph seemed to rise up from its metal body.