, ragged shriek,
and all the time an undertone of the indefinite, peculiar sound of
something rustling, creeping, growing.

* * * * *

Then came the harsh jangle of the general alarm bell.

"Space-suits!" Carse snapped. The alarm was the signal to put them on;
it was a safeguard from a possible breach in the ship's walls. Against
such an emergency they had drilled often, and all over the ship the
crew would be springing rapidly into space-suits hanging ready.

The space-stick automatically locked as Friday, eyes rolling, leaped
with his master to the nearby locker. The shriek from aft had quickly
died, the alarm bell had snapped off; but now there came a frantic
rush of feet, and a man tumbled through into the control cabin, his
face white, his eyes stark with horror, his breath coming in gasps and
the sweat of fear on his brow.

It was Harkness.

He slammed the door tight shut behind him and stumbled to the suit
locker; and as his fingers fumbled at his suit with the clumsiness of
panic, he stammered:

"The cargo--the boxes of horn--it came from aft! Fungus! Planted in
the horn! It's filling the ship! Got all the others and grew--_grew_
on them! Dead already. There--look, look!"

Carse and Friday, grotesque giants in the bulky sheathings of stiff,
many-plied fabric, turned as one and peered through their quartzite
face shields to where the navigator's bulging eyes directed them.

It was the door between control cabin and engine room--the door he had
just slammed shut. At first nothing was visible; then they saw the van
of the enemy that had swarmed through the ship.

A thin line of bright yellow color had appeared along the under crack
of the door. A second later the door was rimmed on all sides with it.
It grew; reached out. Energy flowed through it: fingers of dusty
yellow pronged out from the cracks where the door fitted, hung
wavering for a moment, melted together, then slumped to the floor to
more quickly continue the advance. It increased marvelously, in minor
jerks of speed. It was delicate in texture, mold-like. The more there
became, the faster it grew: in seconds shreds of it had darted out
from the main mass and affixed themselves to the walls and ceiling of
the cabin, there to accelerate the horrible filling process.

* * * * *

All this happened more quickly than it can be related. Within ten
seconds most of the cabin was coated b