Neither one of them was absorbed in the game of mutual greetings. He reached out far beyond her range of perception to see if there was anything near the ship. It was funny how it was possible to do two things at once. He could scan space with his pin-set mind and yet at the same time catch a vagrant thought of hers, a lovely, affectionate thought about a son who had had a golden face and a chest covered with soft, incredibly downy white fur. While he was still searching, he caught the warning from her. _We jump again!_ And so they had. The ship had moved to a second planoform. The stars were different. The Sun was immeasurably far behind. Even the nearest stars were barely in contact. This was good Dragon country, this open, nasty, hollow kind of space. He reached farther, faster, sensing and looking for danger, ready to fling the Lady May at danger wherever he found it. Terror blazed up in his mind, so sharp, so clear, that it came through as a physical wrench. The little girl named West had found something--something immense, long, black, sharp, greedy, horrific. She flung Captain Wow at it. Underhill tried to keep his own mind clear. "Watch out!" he shouted telepathically at the others, trying to move the Lady May around. At one corner of the battle, he felt the lustful rage of Captain Wow as the big Persian tomcat detonated lights while he approached the streak of dust which threatened the ship and the people within. The lights scored near-misses. The dust flattened itself, changing from the shape of a sting-ray into the shape of a spear. Not three milliseconds had elapsed. * * * * * Father Moontree was talking human words and was saying in a voice that moved like cold molasses out of a heavy jar, "C-A-P-T-A-I-N." Underhill knew that the sentence was going to be "Captain, move fast!" The battle would be fought and finished before Father Moontree got through talking. Now, fractions of a millisecond later, the Lady May was directly in line. Here was where the skill and speed of the Partners came in. She could react faster than he. She could see the threat as an immense Rat coming direct at her. She could fire the light-bombs with a discrimination which he might miss. He was connected with her mind, but he could not follow it. His consciousness absorbed the tearing wound inflicted by the alien enemy. It was like no wound on Earth--raw, crazy pain which started like a burn at his navel. He began to writhe in his chair. Actually he had not yet had time to move a muscle when the Lady May struck back at their enemy. Five evenly spaced photonuclear bombs blazed out across a hundred thousand miles. The pain in his mind and body vanished. [Illustration]