Somewhere out there in that star-studded blackness was the enemy. The main body was not in detector range yet, but it was there, nevertheless. Jockeying into position, warming up their blasters, swinging turrets to hair-line accuracy and waiting ... waiting.... His detector clattered determinedly now. Pell glanced at it. A brief smile flitted over his hard, tensed features. At least two were out of range. Experimentally he flicked his blaster switch and was pleased with the deadly cones of blue radiance which flickered from the gun snouts. _There! And there!_ Converging above and below the nose of his ship were swarms of deadly little two-man Mark IX's. Dimly he could make out in the detector screen the deadly blue lattice-work of blaster beams that awaited him. Under this pressure his mind worked like a machine with the speed of light, analyzing, rejecting, planning, replanning.... As they blew up in size with fantastic speed on the screen, Pell acted like lightning. In a blurring motion he cut the converter, fell free for an instant, wound up the converter to the aft jets and thrust up--up, and suddenly out of range. But the enemy had anticipated his move. As he eased the thrust from the aft jets, two points of light twinkled and blossomed in the duration of a single heart-beat into his screen. A pair of DIC fighters! And they had him like a cold pigeon! * * * * * For one brief instant Pell was paralyzed and that was long enough for the enemy. The whistling _whoosh_ of air escaping through a rent in the hull died away as the automatic self-sealers went into action, but it gave vivid testimony of the enemy's aim. Reacting like a coiled spring, Pell jabbed his blaster switch, catching one of the DIC fighters squarely in his sights. It seemed to fall to pieces in the midst of the minor nova of its own disintegration. The second enemy fighter flashed past like a bullet, but not before Pell chewed off half its aft jets with his blasters. For a moment he was in the clear. Quickly he examined the function dials; found to his dismay that his aft jets were nothing more than slag now, with all the tube connections severed. "What ... what happened?" Gret gasped. "We've been in a fight, baby, and we got a black eye," Pell cracked. "But don't worry--I'll set this can down in spite of those missing jets." He bent over his instruments again, a furrow slowly forming between his brows. That fight had taken time--too much valuable time. He had just two hours to decelerate from the tremendous velocity of the ship to the comparative slow velocity of Centauri V. Discarding the last of his caution, he crammed all the braking thrust possible on the ancient converter. Up--up went the gravity needle; up past the red line at 23 G's; up past a heart-wracking 27 G's; up to an inconceivable thirty gravities where it quivered sluggishly.