Topping shrugged. "It could be. It could even be one of ours. From the future, perhaps. We've done some weird doubling about in the space-time continuum, remember." "It could be anything, then," said Braun. "Anything," echoed Topping. "Start deceleration," ordered Charters, concerned with the more practical aspects of a possible encounter in alien space. "Swing the controls over to manual. I'll feel better about the ship if it comes to dodging a collision. You have the practical piloting experience, Braun. Take over." Grinning, Braun seated himself at the manual keyboard and started pressing studs. Lights blinked off and on in patterns on the screen at vision level. He switched over to the visiplates mounted on the blunt bow. A sector of blackness dead ahead was projected onto the screen. There was nothing to see. Light in interstellar space is too feeble to reveal anything not self luminous. "Try a radilume beam," suggested Charters. * * * * * The screen flickered, then resumed its blackness. With no dust, no anything, to reflect light back to the ship, the beam lost itself in the immensity. Braun worked with the studs. "We're slowing," he announced. "Now what?" "Try a dead stop, but be ready to move out fast in case the alien continues a collision course." Braun nodded. In the artificial gravity field, no effect of deceleration was perceptible. The ship slowed and stopped as dead as a ship stops with no reference point to anything. What actually happened was a delicate balancing upon a number of mathematical equations, themselves unstable. Mass proximity needles, showing the expected increase by squares, indicated that the stranger also had come to a full stop by matching exactly at zero. It was an interesting fact that so far from home the familiar laws of gravity seemed to hold their familiar relations. More interesting was the fact that the alien object or ship had stopped. "See anything?" asked Charters. "Not a thing," admitted Topping. "How about the telescopes?" McClure, the astrogator, reported then. Under the circumstances, his voice sounded curiously matter of fact. "A faint point of light. Not enough disk to tell much of anything about it. We'll try with--" "Can't be more than a mile away, I'd guess," said Braun. "What do we do now? Just sit here and wait?" Topping grunted. "Reminds me of a pair of strange dogs meeting away from home and sniffing at each other with mutual curiosity and mistrust." "That's about the way it would be," Charters agreed weakly. "If that is an alien ship out there, what else could we do?" "We could try for contact. Communicate with them, somehow." "Morse code?" asked Braun bitterly. "There were humans in other parts of our own galaxy. Some of them intelligent and highly civilized. We set up communications with them."