"I kept on trying until they blanketed my wave, but all negative. Thousands of times too far for my transmitter. Our only hope of reaching anybody was the mighty slim chance that our super-ship might be prowling around out here already, but it isn't, of course. Here they are!" Reaching out to the control panel, Costigan shot out against the great vessel wave after wave of lethal vibrations, under whose fiercely clinging impacts the Nevian defensive screens flared white; but, strangely enough, their own screens did not radiate. As if contemptuous of any weapons the lifeboat might wield, the mother ship simply defended herself from the attacking beams, in much the same fashion as a wildcat mother wards off the claws and teeth of her spitting, snarling kitten who is resenting a touch of needed maternal discipline. "They probably won't fight us, at that," Clio first understood the situation. "This is their own lifeboat, and they want us alive, you know." "There's one more thing we can try--hang on!" Costigan snapped, as he released his screens and threw all his power into one enormous pressor beam. The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight, as if the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam's reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it slowly to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls, launching his every driving force and his every weapon, but no beam could penetrate that red murk, and the lifeboat remained motionless in space. No, not motionless--the red rod was shortening, drawing the truant craft back toward the launching port from which she had so hopefully emerged a few days before. Back and back it was drawn; Costigan's utmost efforts futile to affect by a hair's breadth its line of motion. Through the open port the boat slipped neatly, and as it came to a halt in its original position within the multilayered skin of the monster, the prisoners heard the heavy doors clang shut behind them, one after another. And then sheets of blue fire snapped and crackled all about the three suits of Triplanetary armor--the two large human figures and the small one were outlined starkly in blinding blue flame. "That's the first thing that has come off according to schedule." Costigan laughed, a short, fierce bark. "That is their paralyzing ray; we've got it stopped cold, and we've each got enough iron to hold it forever." "But it looks as though the best we can do is to stalemate," Bradley argued. "Even if they can't paralyze us, we can't hurt them, and we are heading back for Nevia."