The _Quest III_ bored steadily on through space, decelerating. Even if one were no fatalist, there seemed no reason to stop decelerating or change course. There was nowhere else to go and too little fuel left if there had been; come what might, this was journey's end--perhaps in a more violent and final way than had been anticipated. All around wheeled the pigmy enemies, circling, maneuvering, and attacking, always attacking, with the senseless fury of maddened hornets. The interstellar ship bore no offensive weapons--but suddenly on one of the vision screens a speck of light flared into nova-brilliance, dazzling the watchers for the brief moment in which its very atoms were torn apart. Knof Jr. whooped ecstatically and then subsided warily, but no one was paying attention to him. The men on the _Quest III's_ bridge looked questions at each other, as the thought of help from outside flashed into many minds at once. But Captain Llud said soberly, "It must have caught one of their own shots, reflected. Maybe its own, if it scored too direct a hit." He studied the data so far gathered. A few blurred pictures had been got, which showed cylindrical space ships much like the _Quest III_, except that they were rocket-propelled and of far lesser size. Their size was hard to ascertain, because you needed to know their distance and speed--but detector-beam echoes gave the distance, and likewise, by the Doppler method, the velocity of directly receding or approaching ships. It was apparent that the enemy vessels were even smaller than Gwar Den had at first supposed--not large enough to hold even one man. Tiny, deadly hornets with a colossal sting. "Robot craft, no doubt," said Knof Llud, but a chill ran down his spine as it occurred to him that perhaps the attackers weren't of human origin. They had seen no recognizable life in the part of the galaxy they had explored, but one of the other _Quests_ might have encountered and been traced home by some unhuman race that was greedy and able to conquer. * * * * * It became evident, too, that the bombardment was being kept up by a constant arrival of fresh attackers, while others raced away into space, presumably returning to base to replenish their ammunition. That argued a planned and prepared interception with virulent hatred behind it. Elsuz Llug, the gravitic engineer, calculated dismally, "At the rate we're having to shed energy, the fuel will be gone in six or eight hours." "We'll have reached Earth before then," Gwar Den said hopefully. "If they don't bring out the heavy artillery first." "We're under the psychological disadvantage," said the captain, "of not knowing why we're being attacked." Knof Jr. burst out, spluttering slightly with the violence of a thought too important to suppress, "But we're under a ps-psychological advantage, too!" His father raised an eyebrow. "What's that? I don't seem to have noticed it."