There was a scraping against the hull and a light jolt as a talon secured a hold on an eyelet ring. A black bulk dropped down on the nose of the craft. A pair of hands gripped the barrels of the machine guns, and with an easy tug, tore them from their mountings. There were shifting scratching sounds coming through the flier's light shell--heavy bodies moving about, and then a sudden ripping vibration. The control lever felt loose in Shelby's hand. He could no longer guide the vessel. And there was nothing either he or Jan could do except wait. The rocket motors still purred evenly. "I guess they've got us this time, Jan," the young man said to his companion. "I wonder what they are going to do with us?" He spoke as casually as though this latest unfavorable turn of fortune was no more serious than the loss of a game of chess. Janice Darell was equally cool. "Next time we win," she laughed. It is odd how human beings so often react to strange and terrifying situations. "I'm always ready, you see. Here I was crouching behind you throughout the fight with this perfectly useless pistol in my hand, hoping foolishly that I might be able to use it. That's loyalty." They fell to studying the two monsters which rested on the nose of the craft in front of the pilot's observation window, where the guns had been. The Space Man was crouching out there trying to peer in at them. He was very much like Alkebar--only not so large, and his equipment and adornment did not boast so many jewels. Shelby felt a peculiar sense of the unreality of the creature. He looked into its face and saw its eyes. Beside the left orb was a mottled area that must have been a scar. It seemed as concrete as anything he had ever seen, and yet for the second time, he told himself that such a creature wasn't possible! Time honored tradition had said: "Life can exist only where there is oxygen, water and warmth." And all three of the requisites were lacking in the void. Shelby realized that tradition might be wrong, but the question still remained: How did these creatures of space live? Whence came the energy that kept their bodies functioning? If not from the combustion of food with oxygen, then where? If there were no moisture in their bodies, and there certainly couldn't be, for it would have been frozen in an instant and diffused through sublimation, how could vital fluids flow through their veins? He put these questions to Jan, but she shook her head. "Hekki informed me that these people inhabited a region somewhere beyond Mars, but he did not tell how it was that they could live in space," she said. "It might be that they have had a development similar to terrestrial insects with the skeleton of armor enclosing their flesh."