"You black-hearted baby-killing rotter," snarled Don Channing. "I'm not chinning with you for the fun of it. You'll shoot anyway, and I want to see how good you are. Get it over with, Murdoch." "What I have here is plenty good," said Murdoch. "Good enough. Do you know about it?" "I can guess, but you tell me." "Naturally," said Hellion. He explained in detail. "Can you best that?" "We may not be able to outfire you," gritted Channing, "but we may be able to nullify your beam." "Nonsense!" roared Murdoch, "Look, Channing, you'd best surrender." "Never!" "You'd rather die?" "We'd rather fight it out. Come in and get us." "Oh no. We'll just shoot your little Station full of holes. Like the average spaceship, your Station will be quite capable of handling communications even though the air is all gone. Filling us full of holes wouldn't do a thing; you see, we're wearing spacesuits." "I guessed that. No, Murdoch, we have nothing to shoot at you this time. All we can do is to hold you off until you get hungry. You'll get hungry first, since we're self-sufficient." "And in the meantime?" "In the meantime we're going to try a few things out on your hull. I rather guess that you'll try out a few things on the Station, but at the present, you can't harm us and we can't harm you. Stalemate, Murdoch!' "You're bluffing!" stormed Murdoch. "Are you afraid to squirt that beam this way?" asked Channing tauntingly. "Or do you know it will not work?" "Why are you so anxious to get killed?" "We're very practical, out here on Venus Equilateral," said Don. "There's no use in working further if you have something that is really good. We'd like to know our chances before we expend more effort along another line." "That's not all--?" "No. Frankly, I'm almost certain that your beam won't do a thing to Venus Equilateral." "We'll see. Listen! Turretman! Are you ready?" Faintly, the reply came, and Channing could hear it. "Ready!" "Then fire all three. Pick your targets at will. One blast!"