bout their way not realizing that their own
immediate deaths had been averted.

From then on, it was easy--almost.

* * * * *

Planoforming ships always carried telepaths. Telepaths had their
sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were
telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind. The pin-sets in turn
were electronically geared into small dirigible light bombs. Light did
it.

Light broke up the Dragons, allowed the ships to reform
three-dimensionally, skip, skip, skip, as they moved from star to
star.

The odds suddenly moved down from a hundred to one against mankind to
sixty to forty in mankind's favor.

This was not enough. The telepaths were trained to become
ultrasensitive, trained to become aware of the Dragons in less than a
millisecond.

But it was found that the Dragons could move a million miles in just
under two milliseconds and that this was not enough for the human mind
to activate the light beams.

Attempts had been made to sheath the ships in light at all times.

This defense wore out.

As mankind learned about the Dragons, so too, apparently, the Dragons
learned about mankind. Somehow they flattened their own bulk and came
in on extremely flat trajectories very quickly.

Intense light was needed, light of sunlike intensity. This could be
provided only by light bombs. Pinlighting came into existence.

Pinlighting consisted of the detonation of ultra-vivid miniature
photonuclear bombs, which converted a few ounces of a magnesium
isotope into pure visible radiance.

The odds kept coming down in mankind's favor, yet ships were being
lost.

It became so bad that people didn't even want to find the ships
because the rescuers knew what they would see. It was sad to bring
back to Earth three hundred bodies ready for burial and two hundred or
three hundred lunatics, damaged beyond repair, to be wakened, and fed,
and cleaned, and put to sleep, wakened and fed again until their lives
were ended.

[Illustration]

Telepaths tried to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been
damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid
spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id
itself, the volcanic source of life.

Then came the Partners.

Man and Partner could do together what Man could not do alone. Men had
the intellect. Partners had the speed.

The Partners rode their tiny craft, no larger