The Rumi had picked up the Terran craft also, because even as I watched one of the alien cruisers peeled off and headed toward it. The Terran craft was aware of its danger now and had changed course and was heading directly toward the Nestrond system. My eyes glued to the spacescope I watched as the two ships came within visual range. The long black Rumi cruiser with its bulging blaster turrets was closing in quickly on a small Terran Crossley 18 of a type used mostly for private yachts. I watched as the Terran ship went into what must have been a body wracking turn in a desperate attempt to throw off the cruiser. The pilot of the Crossley was good but not good enough. A disruptor beam from the raider caught the Earth ship in the port tubes and it fell away spiraling into the gravity of Thirty, with flames engulfing its after portion as it reached atmosphere. With only a few hundred feet to spare the damaged spacer pulled out of its fall with a flare of landing rockets, slowly leveled off into a wobbly glide and headed for a fairly level plateau about twenty miles from my bunker. Then the Rumi ship was coming back, orbiting just outside atmosphere and finally plunging into it to pass over my concealed post with the heavy beat of ion rockets. The big ship filled my whole vision screen for a few moments and I would have given my ears for a pair of six-inch blasters in turret mounting. But I didn’t even have as much as a sidearm; Watchers were supposed to watch and warn, not fight. The raider swept across the bow of the crippled Terran ship and poured everything she had into it at point blank range. I could see that she had been holed repeatedly but was still not finished, she had a pair of jets in action and someone at the controls who knew his business. The one thing that the automatics can’t do is to set a spacer down in one piece; the intricate business of landing takes a pilot, not exactly a superman but the closest thing to homo superior in reflexes and know-how you could find. And setting a damaged ship down on a pillar of fire with only half your jets in action just can’t be done. The guy in this ship came close, though. He was at tree top level now, shaving off trees like blades of grass and splashing flame about like a Martian fire dancer, fighting the ship all the way. He just couldn’t keep her level and the ship nosed over and smashed itself into a ball of smoke and flame in a dry river bed. The odds against anyone surviving that crack-up seemed overwhelming but with my scanner trained for close range I thought I saw a space-suited figure stumble, fall and then crawl away from the ship just before the fuel tanks let go with a blast that shook every instrument in my station.