equired for them to see that the white dwarf
had gone out. Half of this gave them the distance from the star in light
seconds.

The screen had already been rigged to flash the information into a
computer, which in turn gave a time signal to the robot pilot that would
turn on the drive at precisely the right instant. There was no time for
human error here; the velocities were too great and the time for error
too small.

Then they waited. They had to wait for seven hours spinning dizzily
around an improbably tiny star with an equally improbably titanic
gravitational field. A star only a couple of dozens of miles across, and
yet so dense that it weighed half a million times as much as the Earth!
And they had to wait while another star like it, chilled now to absolute
zero, fell toward them!

"I wish we could stay around to see the splash," Arcot said. "It's going
to be something to see. All the kinetic energy of those two masses
slamming into each other is going to be a blaze of light that will
really be something!"

Wade was looking nervously at the telectroscope plate. "I wish we could
see that other sun. I don't like the idea of a thing that big creeping
up on us in the dark."

"Calm down," Morey said quietly. "It's out of our hands now; we took a
chance, and it was a chance we _had_ to take. If you want to watch
something, watch Junior down there. It's going to start doing some
pretty interesting tricks."

As the dense black sun approached them, Junior, as Morey had called it,
did begin to do tricks. At first they seemed to be optical effects, as
though the eye itself were playing tricks. The red, glowing ball beneath
them began to grow transparent around its surface, leaving an opaque red
core which seemed to be shrinking slowly.

"What's happening?" Fuller asked.

"Our orbit around the star is becoming more and more elliptical," Arcot
replied. "As the other sun pulls us, the star beneath us grows smaller
with the distance; then, as we begin to fall back toward it, it grows
larger again. Since this is taking place many hundreds of times per
second, the visual pictures all seem to blend in together."

"Watch the clock," Morey said suddenly, pointing.

The men watched tensely as the hand moved slowly around.

"Ten--nine--eight--seven--six--five--four--three--two--one--ZERO!"

A relay slammed home, and almost instantaneously, everyone on the ship
was slammed into unconsciousness.

XII

Hours la