n diameter. The ships dipped their noses as if
to pass well under it. They drew very close. Pink bent to his speaker
and bellowed, "Now!"

* * * * *

As one, the auxiliary jets of each ship roared into life. _Cottabus_ and
_Diogenes_ leaped out beside their flagship, and like three hotshot
pilots buzzing an airdrome, the captains took the enormous spacecraft
hurtling for the surface of the asteroid. Passing beneath it--or,
thought Pink irrelevantly, while every nerve and sinew concentrated on
the dangerous task, perhaps they were flying over it upside down--they
brought their years of training and experience to bear on the problem of
missing that knobbed gray surface by the smallest margin possible.
_Diogenes_ actually scraped her superstructure, with a noise that made
every hair on her captain's neck stand upright; the others missed the
planetoid by no more than a foot or two. Then they were clear and again
in the void.

According to orders, they slowed at a distance of four hundred miles,
and eagerly scanned one another in their viewscreens for signs of the
giants.

Pink gave a loud shout of relief, and took a second to realize that his
co-captains had each groaned....

The riders on _Cottabus_ and _Diogenes_ had vanished, and were
undoubtedly back there by the asteroid, reconstituting their bashed-up
bodies angrily. But Pink now heard, with a sinking heart, that his giant
was still with him. It had leaned backward from the knees, lying flat on
the hull which it had gripped with legs and arms. Somehow it had grasped
Pink's plan in time to prepare itself. The asteroid had flattened its
face and chest like a plane smoothing wood, and it was now forming
itself anew, with, so they told Pink, a truly malicious scowl on its
reformed lips.

Jerry was standing with a hand on Pink's shoulder; he had forgotten
Circe in the tenseness of the bid for freedom. She came up on the other
side and put her own hand on the captain's other shoulder. He was
startled, and realizing that she could have killed or captured them
both, had she wished, chalked up another doubt in his mind against the
theory of her alienness.

"Please come outside," she said urgently. "I want to suggest something
to you."

He rose at once and followed her to the door, while Jerry frowned and
the dying giant watched him out of faded red eyes. In the hall, she
said, "You're almost licked, Captain. It's time for desperation