grunting
sound of rockets leaving their launching tubes came before his first
syllable was complete. Then there was silence while the skipper gathered
breath for a masterpiece of profanity. But Taine snapped:

"_That dance was a sneak-up! The Plumie came four miles nearer while we
watched!_"

Baird jerked his eyes from watching the Plumie. He looked at the master
radar. It was faintly blurred with the fading lines of past gyrations,
but the golden ship was much nearer the _Niccola_ than it had been.

"Radar reporting," said Baird sickishly. "Mr. Taine is correct. The
Plumie ship did approach us while it danced."

Taine's voice snarled:

"_Reload even numbers with chemical-explosive war heads. Then remove
atomics from odd numbers and replace with chemicals. The range is too
short for atomics._"

Baird felt curiously divided in his own mind. He disliked Taine very
much. Taine was arrogant and suspicious and intolerant even on the
_Niccola_. But Taine had been right twice, now. The Plumie ship had crept
closer by pure trickery. And it was right to remove atomic war heads from
the rockets. They had a pure-blast radius of ten miles. To destroy the
Plumie ship within twice that would endanger the _Niccola_--and leave
nothing of the Plumie to examine afterward.

The Plumie ship must have seen the rocket flares, but it continued to
dance, coming nearer and ever nearer in seemingly heedless and
purposeless plungings and spinnings in star-speckled space. But suddenly
there were racing, rushing trails of swirling vapor. Half the _Niccola's_
port broadside plunged toward the golden ship. The fraction of a second
later, the starboard half-dozen chemical-explosive rockets swung
furiously around the ship's hull and streaked after their brothers. They
moved in utterly silent, straight-lined, ravening ferocity toward their
target. Baird thought irrelevantly of the vapor trails of an
atmosphere-liner in the planet's upper air.

The ruled-line straightness of the first six rockets' course abruptly
broke. One of them veered crazily out of control. It shifted to an almost
right-angled course. A second swung wildly to the left. A third and
fourth and fifth--The sixth of the first line of rockets made a great,
sweeping turn and came hurtling back toward the _Niccola_. It was like a
nightmare. Lunatic, erratic lines of sunlit vapor eeled before the
background of all the stars in creation.

Then the second half-dozen rockets broke r