an
barked his order she tried, but stopped, floundering, almost directly
below the invisible network of communicator beams. As she struggled one
mailed arm went up, and Costigan saw in his ultra-goggles the faint
flash as the beam encountered the interfering field. But already he had
acted. Crouching low, he struck down the arm, seized it, and dragged the
girl out of the zone of visibility. Then in furious haste he opened a
nearby door and all three sprang into a tiny compartment.

"Shut off all the fields of your suits, so that they can't interfere!"
he hissed into the utter darkness. "Not that I'd mind killing a few of
them, but if they start an organized search we're sunk. But even if they
did get a warning by touching your glove, Clio, they probably won't
suspect us. Our rooms are still shielded, and the chances are that
they're too busy to bother much about us, anyway."

He was right. A few beams darted here and there, but the Nevians saw
nothing amiss and ascribed the interference to the falling into the beam
of some chance bit of charged metal. With no further misadventures the
Terrestrials gained entrance to the Nevian lifeboat, where Costigan's
first act was to disconnect one steel boot from his armor of space. With
a sigh of relief he pulled his foot out of it, and from it carefully
poured into the small power-tank of the craft fully thirty pounds of
allotropic iron!

"I pinched it off them," he explained, in answer to amazed and inquiring
looks, "and maybe you don't think it's a relief to get it out of that
boot! I couldn't steal a flask to carry it in, so this was the only
place I could put it in. These lifeboats are equipped with only a couple
of grams of iron apiece, you know, and we couldn't get half-way back to
Tellus on that, even with smooth going; and we may have to fight. With
this much to go on, though, we could go to Andromeda, fighting all the
way. Well, we'd better break away."

Costigan watched his plate closely, and, when the maneuvering of the
great vessel brought his exit port as far away as possible from the
Third City and the warring citadels of the deep, he shot the little
cruiser out and away. Straight out into the ocean it sped, through the
murky red veil, and darted upward toward the surface. The three
wanderers sat tense, hardly daring to breathe, staring into the
plates--Clio and Bradley pushing at metal levers and stepping down hard
upon metal brakes in unconscious efforts to hel