ur Loftiness?"

"Silence, fool! Stretts do not commit errors!"

* * * * *

As soon as it was clear that no one had been injured, Sawtelle demanded,
"How about it, Hilton?"

"Structurally, it was high-alloy steel. There were many bulges, possibly
containing mechanisms. There were drive-units of a non-Terran type.
There were many projectors, which--at a rough guess--were a hundred
times as powerful as any I have ever seen before. There were no
indications that the thing had ever been enclosed, in whole or in part.
It certainly never had living quarters for warm-blooded,
oxygen-breathing eaters of organic food."

Sawtelle snorted. "You mean it never had a crew?"

"Not necessarily...."

"Bah! What other kind of intelligent life is there?"

"I don't know. But before we speculate too much, let's look at the
tri-di. The camera may have caught something I missed."

It hadn't. The three-dimensional pictures added nothing.

"It probably was operated either by programmed automatics or by remote
control," Hilton decided, finally. "But how did they drain all our
power? And just as bad, what and how is that other point source of power
we're heading for now?"

"What's wrong with it?" Sawtelle asked.

"Its strength. No matter what distance or reactant I assume, nothing we
know will fit. Neither fission nor fusion will do it. It has to be
practically total conversion!"

II

The _Perseus_ snapped out of overdrive near the point of interest and
Hilton stared, motionless and silent.

Space was full of madly warring ships. Half of them were bare, giant
skeletons of steel, like the "derelict" that had so unexpectedly
blasted away from them. The others were more or less like the _Perseus_,
except in being bigger, faster and of vastly greater power.

Beams of starkly incredible power bit at and clung to equally capable
defensive screens of pure force. As these inconceivable forces met, the
glare of their neutralization filled all nearby space. And ships and
skeletons alike were disappearing in chunks, blobs, gouts, streamers and
sparkles of rended, fused and vaporized metal.

Hilton watched two ships combine against one skeleton. Dozens of beams,
incredibly tight and hard, were held inexorably upon dozens of the
bulges of the skeleton. Overloaded, the bulges' screens flared through
the spectrum and failed. And bare metal, however refractory, endures
only for instants under the appall