er, the little finger, and the
thumb of the other hand were the first three battleships to be lost to
the Rats--lost as people realized that there was something out there
_underneath space itself_ which was alive, capricious and malevolent.

Planoforming was sort of funny. It felt like like--

Like nothing much.

Like the twinge of a mild electric shock.

Like the ache of a sore tooth bitten on for the first time.

Like a slightly painful flash of light against the eyes.

Yet in that time, a forty-thousand-ton ship lifting free above Earth
disappeared somehow or other into two dimensions and appeared half a
light-year or fifty light-years off.

At one moment, he would be sitting in the Fighting Room, the pin-set
ready and the familiar Solar System ticking around inside his head.
For a second or a year (he could never tell how long it really was,
subjectively), the funny little flash went through him and then he was
loose in the Up-and-Out, the terrible open spaces between the stars,
where the stars themselves felt like pimples on his telepathic mind
and the planets were too far away to be sensed or read.

Somewhere in this outer space, a gruesome death awaited, death and
horror of a kind which Man had never encountered until he reached out
for inter-stellar space itself. Apparently the light of the suns kept
the Dragons away.

* * * * *

Dragons. That was what people called them. To ordinary people, there
was nothing, nothing except the shiver of planoforming and the hammer
blow of sudden death or the dark spastic note of lunacy descending
into their minds.

But to the telepaths, they were Dragons.

In the fraction of a second between the telepaths' awareness of a
hostile something out in the black, hollow nothingness of space and
the impact of a ferocious, ruinous psychic blow against all living
things within the ship, the telepaths had sensed entities something
like the Dragons of ancient human lore, beasts more clever than
beasts, demons more tangible than demons, hungry vortices of aliveness
and hate compounded by unknown means out of the thin tenuous matter
between the stars.

It took a surviving ship to bring back the news--a ship in which, by
sheer chance, a telepath had a light beam ready, turning it out at the
innocent dust so that, within the panorama of his mind, the Dragon
dissolved into nothing at all and the other passengers, themselves
non-telepathic, went a