ed like a wet, black, rotten stump
swarming with life inside and out.

Neither she nor the two men had made much mention of its appearance. All
you could say was that it was horrible.

The plasmoids they could see ignored the ship. They also gave no
noticeable attention to the eight space flares the Commissioner had set
in a rough cube about the station. But for the first two hours after
their arrival, the ship's meteor reflectors remained active. An
occasional tap at first, then an almost continuous pecking, finally a
twenty-minute drumfire that filled the reflector screens with madly
dancing clouds of tiny sparks. Suddenly it ended. Either the king
plasmoid had exhausted its supply of that particular weapon or it
preferred to conserve what it had left.

"Might test their guns," the Commissioner muttered. He looked very
unhappy, Trigger thought.

He circled off, put on speed, came back and flicked the ship past the
station's flank. He drew bursts from two pits with a promptness which
confirmed what already had been almost a certainty--that the gun
installations operated automatically. They seemed remarkably feeble
weapons for a station of that size. The Devagas apparently had had sense
enough not to give the plasmoid every advantage.

The Commissioner plunked a test shot next into one of the black
protuberances. A small fiery crater appeared. It darkened quickly again.
Out of the biggest opening, down near what would have been the foot of
the stump if it had been a stump, something, long, red and wormlike
wriggled rapidly. It flowed up over the structure's surface to the
damaged point and thrust the tip of its front end into the crater. Black
material began to flow from the tip. The plasmoid moved its front end
back and forth across the damaged area. Others of the same kind came out
and joined it. The crater began to fill out.

They hauled away a little and surfaced. Normal space looked clean,
beautiful, homelike, calmly shining. None of them except Lyad had slept
for over twenty hours. "What do you think?" the Commissioner asked.

They discussed what they had seen in subdued voices. Nobody had a plan.
They agreed that one thing they could be sure of was that the Vishni
Fleet people and any other human beings who might have been on the
station when it was turned over to the king plasmoid were no longer
alive. Unless, of course, something had been done to them much more
drastic than had happened to the Aurora's