.

So this was it.

"All right," she said.

* * * * *

The armor suit's triple light-beam blazed into the wide, low, black,
wet-looking mouth rushing toward her. It was much bigger than she had
thought when looking at it from the ship. Far behind her, the fire
needles of the single gun pit which her passage to the station had
aroused still slashed mindlessly about. They weren't geared to stop
suits, and they hadn't come anywhere near her. But the plasmoids looked
geared to stop suits.

They were swarming in clusters in the black mouth like maggots in a
rotting skull. Part of the swarms had spilled out over the lips of the
mouth, clinging, crawling, rippling swiftly about. Trigger shifted the
flight controls with the fingers of one hand, dropping a little, then
straightening again. She might be coming in too fast. But she had to get
past that mass at the opening.

Then the black mouth suddenly yawned wide before her. Her left hand
pressed the gun handle. Twin blasts stabbed ahead, blinding white,
struck the churning masses, blazed over them. They burned, scattered,
exploded, and rolled back, burning and exploding, in a double wave to
meet her.

"Too fast!" Repulsive said anxiously. "Much too fast!"

She knew it. But she couldn't have forced herself to do it slowly. The
armor suit slammed at a slant into a piled, writhing, burning hardness
of plasmoid bodies, bounced upward. She went over and over, yanking down
all the way on the flight controls. She closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them again, the suit hung poised a little above black
uneven flooring, turned back half toward the entrance mouth. A black
ceiling was less than twenty feet above her head.

The plasmoids were there. The suit's light beams played over the massed,
moving ranks: squat bodies and sinuous ones, immensities that scraped
the ceiling, stalked limbs and gaping nutcracker jaws, blurs of motion
her eyes couldn't step down to define into shapes. Some still blazed
with her guns' white fire. The closest were thirty feet away.

They stayed there. They didn't come any closer.

She swung the suit slowly away from the entrance. The ring was closed
all about her. But it wasn't tightening.

Repulsive had thought he could do it.

She asked in her mind, "Which way?"

She got a feeling of direction, turned the suit a little more and
started it gliding forward. The ranks ahead didn't give way, but they