He pushed Burdick aside and went across the narrow room to the curving glassite-panelled wall on the other side and stood there. The others left him alone. He heard movement and voices in the corridor, but he paid no attention to them. Nothing was important now. He looked out into space, lighted with the baleful light of the twin suns, and saw the whole great Task Force spread between him and the stars overhead, the destroyers coursing ahead of the main body, all their hulls glittering bright, beautiful, swift, deadly, a brazen spear for the slaying of planets. The small craft in which he and the others were imprisoned was dropping below the fleet. It was extremely difficult to judge speeds here where there was nothing to go by but the stars, but Wyatt thought the Task Force must have been decelerating for some time as it approached its target, and that the small craft was moving considerably faster than the main body. He watched, simply because the ships were before his eyes, and he began to realize that this little ship was leading all the others down to battle. "Like a damn Judas goat," he muttered, and Burdick spoke from beside him. "They took that lady officer away," he said. "I reckon she's in trouble?" Wyatt said, "The worst. She was going to help us escape." Burdick said shrewdly, "Bill and me figured it was something like that. Too bad it went wrong." Wyatt explained why it had gone wrong. "I should have been content with what I had. But I thought if--oh, what the devil's the use of hashing it over!" He looked at the steel rods that separated them from the Alpha Centaurians. "If we could just get those bars out of the way, get all together, the twelve of us--we might still do something. This is a small ship. It can't carry much of a crew, probably not more than five or six beside Makvern. If we could rush them and take the ship, we might be able to force them to fly it to Earth--" Moonshine. Fool's talk, the babble of desperation. On the other hand, what did they have to lose? Their lives, of course. But that would have to be up to the individual. As far as Wyatt was concerned, the pit was no beautiful prospect. And if they succeeded--if-- "Well," said Whitfield, "let's get cracking." He crooked his finger at the Arab, the Turcoman, and No-Name. In the spaceship, with the incredible panorama of space and the racing war fleet beyond the observation panels, the six Earthmen held a conference, speaking to each other not in their own diverse tongues but in the language of Uryx, a place they had never seen and had not even known existed until suddenly it had become the most important thing in their lives. The conference was brief. When it was over Wyatt and Burdick went to the wall of rods and talked to the Alpha Centaurians. * * * * *