he would investigate. But he did not.

"You had better sleep, Haljan. Take advantage now; we shall have
action presently. Did you figure our emerging curve?"

I shoved my computations across the table to him. "There."

"You are quick, Haljan."

"We should emerge from the Moon's shadow in about two hours."

"But I will not hold that course. We're staying close near here with
the other vessels, but I want some velocity always. Take your sleep,
Haljan."

I stretched on the narrow floor mattress. The turret was silent.

I was aroused from a doze by Molo's activities in the turret. The
girls and Meka were still below. The ever-silent Venusian, squatting
in the turret corner, still had his gun upon me.

I saw that Grantline's ships, over a wide fan-shaped spread, were
advancing.

And presently we were engaged in the soundless turmoil of battle. I
cannot relate more than fragments, things I saw and experienced,
during six or more hours of bursting electronic light and puffs of
darkness in that spread of battle area within the Moon-shadow. It was
a silent battle of crossing lights, ships a thousand miles apart,
gathering velocity with great tangential curves; passing each other in
a second; sweeping a thousand miles apart again; turning and coming
back. A hundred engagements.

The _Star-Streak_ was very fast, very mobile, and, unlike all the
other Wandl ships, had the allies' own weapons to use against them. I
saw now why they called Molo the terror of the starways!

We swept into the shadowed battle area. Over all its thousand-mile
spread were the radiant Wandl gravity-beams, disturbing and impeding
the course of Grantline's ships. There was the luminous gleam of
projectile rockets, like little comets, soundless, launched by the
Wandl craft, and the radiance of the rocket-streams which all the
vessels were using now for close maneuvering; the glare of Grantline's
searchlight bombs and his white search-beams to disclose the deadly
whirling discs which the weapons of his vessel must seek out and
destroy. A chaos of silent light, stabbed here and there with
Grantline's darkness bombs, bombs of limited local range which
exploded in space and which, for a few minutes duration, absorbed all
light-rays, giving a temporary effect of darkness.

And then wreckage! Broken, leprous Wandl vessels whose barrage at
close range had been smashed by Grantline's guns; torn and littered
allied ships, struck by the huge exploding co