attention. They passed within five miles
astern of us, but in a great curve they swung and now seemed heading
across our bow. With what tremendous velocity they had been endowed by
their firing mechanisms! Their elliptical curve swung them a mile or
so ahead of us.

They were circling us like tiny satellites in a narrowing spiral
ellipse. Our attraction, the normal gravity of our close bulk, was
drawing them to us.

The men on the _Cometara's_ deck stood gazing, surprised but not yet
alarmed. The lookout calls sounded with routine notification each time
the discs passed across our bow and stern. In the helio cubby, Waters
was still trying to raise an Earth station.

Grantline came running to the control turret. "If those cursed things,
should strike us, Gregg!"

I had set the gravity-plates into new combinations, turning our course
downward, trying to swing us under the plane of the discs' orbit. But
they swung downward with us; they were no more than two thousand feet
away now.

Grantline said, "At the next broadside passing I'll fire at them."

Drac looked up from his calculating instruments. "Look! A circular
rotation: Horribly swift. But I've caught a picture. Look!"

He had a still image of one of the discs. It had saw-teeth at its thin
knife-like outer circumference. Whirling at tremendous speed, these
saw-toothed metal discs might cut into our dome, or some other part of
our ship.

At the next round, Grantline fired. The discs reddened a little, but
came on unharmed. From the other side, he fired again. Three of the
discs seemed to have been caught full. His bolts, sustained for their
fullest ten seconds of duration at this close, thousand-foot range,
took effect. The three discs seemed to crumble with a puff of
queerly-radiant vacuum spark-glows, then were gone.

But the others came closing in.

The _Cometara_ rang now with the excitement and alarm of the men.
Grantline could not set his gauges fast enough to fire at every round.

I had a sudden thought. With the rear rockets, I rolled us over. For a
moment we were hull-down to the passing discs. From our hull
gravity-plates I flung a full repulsion. Would it stave them off, bend
their orbit outward? It did not. Their course was unaltered.

Again Grantline was shouting at me, "Roll us back! I must fire!"

It had been an error, that rolling; Grantline lost several shots
because of it. I swung us level. The discs passed within a hundred
feet; half