he box.

"Ready...."

"Here goes!" Gefty reached into the box, twisted the firing handle.
Light flared in the vault. The deck shook below him. He came stumbling
out from behind the wall.

Maulbow's machine and its stand of instruments had vanished. Where it
had stood was a dark circular hole. Nothing else seemed to have
happened. Gefty clumped hurriedly over to the mining cutter, swung it
around, started more cautiously back towards the hole. He didn't have
the faintest idea what would come next, but a definite possibility was
that he would see the janandra's dark form flowing up over the rim of
the hole. Letting it run into the cutter beam might be the best way to
discourage it from re-entering the _Queen_.

[Illustration]

Instead, a dazzling brilliance suddenly blotted out everything. The
cutter was plucked from Gefty's grasp; then he was picked up, suit and
all, and slammed up towards the vault ceiling. He had a feeling that
inaudible thunders were shaking the ship. He seemed to be rolling over
and over along the ceiling. At last, the suit crashed into something
which showed a total disinclination to yield, and Gefty blacked out.

* * * * *

The left side of his face felt pushed out of shape; his left eye wasn't
functioning too well, and there was a severe pulsing ache throughout the
top of his head. But Gefty felt happy.

There were a few qualifying considerations.

"Of course," he pointed out to Kerim, "all we can really say immediately
is that we're back in normspace and somewhere in the galaxy."

She smiled shakily. "Isn't that saying quite a lot, Gefty?"

"It's something." Gefty glanced around the instrument room. He had
placed an emergency light on the console, but except for that, the
control compartment was in darkness. The renewed battering the _Queen_
had absorbed had knocked out the power in the forward section. The
viewscreens were black, every instrument dead. But he'd seen the stars
of normspace through the torn vault floor. It was something....

"We might have the light that slugged us to thank for that," he said.
"I'm not sure just what did happen there, but it could have been
Maulbow's control unit it was attacking rather than the ship. Maulbow
said the lights were sensitive to the unit. At any rate, we're here, and
we're rid of the gadget--and of the janandra." He hesitated. "I just
don't feel you should get your hopes too high. We may find out we're a