FEW HUNDRED MILES AWAY!"

"There's only one thing to do," Arcot said tightly. "We can never hope
to avoid that thing; we haven't got the power. I'm going to try for an
orbit around it. We'll fall toward it and give the ship all the
acceleration she'll take. There's no time to calculate--I'll just pile
on the speed until we don't fall into it."

The others, strapped into the control chairs, prepared themselves for
the acceleration to come.

If the _Ancient Mariner_ had dropped toward the star from an infinite
distance, Arcot could have applied enough power to put the ship in a
hyperbolic orbit which would have carried them past the star. But they
had come in on the space drive, and had gotten fairly close before the
gravitational field had drained the power from the main coil, and it was
not until the space field had broken that they had started to accelerate
toward the star. Their velocity would not be great enough to form an
escape orbit.

Even now, they would fall far short of enough velocity to get into an
elliptical orbit unless they used the molecular drive.

Arcot headed toward one edge of the star, and poured power into the
molecular drive. The ship shot forward under an additional five and a
half gravities of acceleration. Their velocity had been five thousand
miles per second when they entered hyperspace, and they were swiftly
adding to their original velocity.

They did not, of course, feel the pull of the sun, since they were in
free fall in its field; they could only feel the five and a half
gravities of the molecular drive. Had they been able to experience the
pull of the star, they would have been crushed by their own weight.

Their speed was mounting as they drew nearer to the star, and Arcot was
forcing the ship on with all the additional power he could get. But he
knew that the only hope they had was to get the ship in a closed ellipse
around the star, and a closed ellipse meant that they would be forever
bound to the star as a planet! Helpless, for not even the titanic power
of the _Ancient Mariner_ could enable them to escape!

As the dull red of the dead sun ballooned toward them, Arcot said: "I
think we'll make an orbit, all right, but we're going to be awfully
close to the surface of that thing!"

The others were quiet; they merely watched Arcot and the star as Arcot
made swift movements with the controls, doing all he could to establish
them in an orbit that would be fairly safe.

It