But with all this Wallace could cope. A stern man, old in the service, he was fully capable of controlling a crew unnerved by the ceaseless watching of infinity. He strode through the ship, as stern and calm as though in his office on Earth, holding the men to their duty, their sanity. But when the "flame of all colors" appeared.... * * * * * The _Denebola_ pointed her sharp nose homeward; the frozen, dead lumps of the asteroids dropped behind. A new and clearer expression found its way to the faces of the crew. And then Wrymore flung himself out of a storage compartment, where he'd been sent for a replacement part during one of the interminable repair jobs on the rocket jet. He dashed into the engine room, and the astonished engineers dragged him from behind a convertor, a trembling wreck of a man, near to madness. He told them Kalson's ghost was in the storage cabin--he'd seen it, a crawling flame-like thing, in which all the colors of the spectrum flickered and twined. They put him in sick bay--and the next "day" an electrician calmly reported to the officer on watch the presence of "a funny-colored thing something like a slow flame" in the forward thermal chamber. Investigation revealed nothing but the inexplicable presence of an amount of hydrogen gas. The ship seemed haunted. Men saw, or thought they saw, queer flames in every corner. Captain Wallace wondered if they were all going mad. Only he and Cargyle had yet to see the things. What was worse, things were disappearing--tools, supplies, replacement parts. More hydrogen made its appearance. The effect of all this on the already teetering crew can be imagined. Captain Wallace left the problem of the mysterious flames to Calvin Markoe, the astrophysicist appointed by the Cranford people, and devoted himself to keeping the crew in hand. But for the first time Wallace found himself helpless to stem the tide. The crew were too far gone, too fear-harried and space-crazy to know reason or fear punishment. And when corroded-looking holes began appearing in the walls of the ship, the mutiny burst out with all the savageness and fury of madness long suppressed. Cargyle, the second officer, charged by a yelling, wild-eyed mob of crazy murderers, fought them coldly, shooting with deadly precision. His slow retreat brought him to the little cabin, where his position was almost impregnable, and which he knew connected through the secret passage with the control cabin. He grinned as he crawled along the passage. What would the mutineers think when they charged the cabin and found it empty? They'd be sure the ship was haunted. It was black as the Coal-Sack in the low-ceilinged tunnel. When a dim, elusive light began forming ahead of him, he first thought it a trick of his eyes, but as the thing brightened Cargyle halted and stared in amazement. At last he, too, was seeing one of the haunting flames.