hurtled through the interstellar void
without incident, but finally the operative's fears were realized--his
far-flung detector screens reacted; upon his observation plate lay
revealed Nerado's mammoth space-ship, in full pursuit of its fleeing
lifeboat!

"On your toes, folks--it won't be long now!" Costigan called, and
Bradley and Clio hurried into the tiny control room.

Armor donned and tested, the three Terrestrials stared into the
observation plates, watching the rapidly enlarging pictures of the
Nevian space-ship. Nerado had traced them and was following them, and
such was the power of the great vessel that the nearly inconceivable
velocity of the lifeboat was the veriest crawl in comparison to that of
the pursuing cruiser.

"And we've hardly started to cover the distance back to Tellus. Of
course you couldn't get in touch with anybody yet?" Bradley stated,
rather than asked.

"I kept on trying until they blanketed my wave, but all negative.
Thousands of times too far for my transmitter. Our only hope of reaching
anybody was the mighty slim chance that our super-ship might be prowling
around out here already, but it isn't, of course. Here they are!"

Reaching out to the control panel, Costigan shot out against the great
vessel wave after wave of lethal vibrations, under whose fiercely
clinging impacts the Nevian defensive screens flared white; but,
strangely enough, their own screens did not radiate. As if contemptuous
of any weapons the lifeboat might wield, the mother ship simply defended
herself from the attacking beams, in much the same fashion as a wildcat
mother wards off the claws and teeth of her spitting, snarling kitten
who is resenting a touch of needed maternal discipline.

"They probably won't fight us, at that," Clio first understood the
situation. "This is their own lifeboat, and they want us alive, you
know."

"There's one more thing we can try--hang on!" Costigan snapped, as he
released his screens and threw all his power into one enormous pressor
beam.

The three were thrown to the floor and held there by an awful weight, as
if the lifeboat darted away at the stupendous acceleration of the beam's
reaction against the unimaginable mass of the Nevian sky-rover; but the
flight was of short duration. Along that pressor beam there crept a dull
rod of energy, which surrounded the fugitive shell and brought it slowly
to a halt. Furiously then Costigan set and reset his controls, launching
hi