"Thank God!" he muttered. Then he turned his head to watch the unfolding drama below. The _Hell Bat_ was seconds away from its target, the junkship. The asteroid under the junkship was a rough surface that covered a good portion of the heavens. He could plainly see the rock formation of its surface. And something down there moved. A large square hole appeared well away from the freighter. A soft beam of radiance shot out, bathed the silver length of the _Hell Bat_, reflecting-- The _Hell Bat_ wasn't there. It had been there--and vanished. The pale beam of light from the hole in the planetoid winked out. The _Hell Bat_ had vanished and the freighter was untouched! At two thousand miles per hour Larry watched the planetoid shoot by less than ten miles away, seeming to rotate so that the freighter went over the horizon, leaving only the swiftly dwindling planetoid itself. Larry's gaze jerked to the gray bulk of his SP47 with its long rocket tail as Stella drove it in pursuit of him. But even the SP47 was getting smaller. It would take time for it to reach his speed and start overtaking him. They dwindled, the SP47 and the asteroid, until they were lost in the bottomless blackness of space. The vision of that hung before his eyes. The SP47 with Stella on board, and the barren rock surface of the planetoid, as they retreated into the blackness of infinity as though sucked down and down. The stars became greedy hard-white eyes lurking in the blackness just beyond his fingertips; staring, waiting for him to go mad as the minutes became hours or eternities. But he _was_ mad. Hadn't the _Hell Bat_ just _stopped existing_? There was nothing known to man that could have disintegrated the ship. The robot couldn't have had time to invent and build such a weapon of destruction--nor could it have had time to build an underground fortress in the planetoid. So he was insane. It was all a product of his imagination. _Larry!_ The word impinged on his mind. He wasn't sure whether it had been thought or a sound. It was, he suddenly realized, a voice. A real voice. Stella's. "Stella!" he shouted. Her voice was a prayer of thanks. "You're alive! I wasn't sure. I...." Then, "That was a dirty trick, Larry. I know you had your orders, but I could have gotten my freighter _and_ the robot." "Then go back and get them!" Larry said, suddenly mad. "Don't mind me. I'll be picked up when I reach Proxima Centauri!" "There won't be anything to get." Her voice was bitter. "You _saw_ your ship destroyed?" Larry said. "N-no." She was suddenly confused. Larry laughed. "You mean to tell me when you saw me shoot past you toward outer space you forgot everything else and started after me?" "Of course not! I checked the trajectory, saw that the _Hell Bat_ would hit my freighter dead center, then started after you." She hadn't looked back then. She had been too intent on not losing sight of him to look back. Larry grinned. The grin became a chuckle.