ery brisk
affair. But neither had the onetime Squadron Commander Tate lost much of
his talent along those lines. The frigate had many more guns but no
better range. And he had the faster ship. Four minutes after the first
shots were exchanged, the Aurora blew up.

The ripped hunk of the Aurora's hull which the Commissioner presently
brought into the lock appeared to have had three approximately
quarter-inch holes driven at a slant through it, which subsequently had
been plugged again. The plugging material was plasmoid in character.

"There were two holes in another piece," the Commissioner said, very
thoughtfully. "If that's the average, she was punched in a few thousand
spots. Let's go have a better look."

He and Mantelish maneuvered the gravity crane carrying the holed slab of
steel-alloy into the ship's workshop. Lyad was locked back into her
cabin, and Trigger went on guard in the control room and looked out
wistfully at the stars of normal space.

Half an hour later, the two men came up the passage and joined her. They
appeared preoccupied.

"It's an unpleasant picture, Trigger girl," the Commissioner said.
"Those holes look sort of chewed through. Whatever did the chewing was
also apparently capable of sealing up the portion behind it as it went
along. What it did to the men when it got inside we don't know.
Mantelish feels we might compare it roughly to the effects of ordinary
germ invasion. It doesn't really matter. It fixed them."

"Mighty large germs!" Trigger said. "Why didn't their meteor reflectors
stop them?"

"If the ship was hove to and these things just drifted in gradually--"

"Oh, I see. That wouldn't activate the reflectors. Then, if we keep
moving ourselves--"

"That," said the Commissioner, "was what I had in mind."

28

Trigger couldn't keep from staring at the subspace station. It was
unbelievable.

One could still tell that the human construction gangs had put up a
standard type of armored station down there. A very big, very massive
one, but normally shaped, nearly spherical. One could tell it only by
the fact that at the gun pits the original material still showed
through. Everywhere else it had vanished under great black masses of
material which the plasmoids had added to the station's structure.

All over that black, lumpy, lavalike surface the plasmoids crawled,
walked, soared and wriggled. There were thousands of them, perhaps
hundreds of different types. It look