inished business with all three of us, and
I can well believe that his 'not particularly pleasant extinction' will
be even less so after the way we rooked him."

"I want you to do me a favor, Conway." Clio's face was white with horror
at the thought of facing again that unspeakable creature of gray. "Give
me a gun or something, please. I don't want him ever to look at me that
way again, to say nothing of what else he might do, while I'm alive."

"He won't," Costigan assured her, narrow of eye and grim of jaw. He was,
as she had said, hard. "But you don't want a gun. You might get nervous
and use it too soon. I'll take care of you at the last possible moment,
because if he gets hold of us we won't stand a chance of getting away
again."

For minutes there was silence, Costigan surveying the ether in all
directions with his ultra-wave device. Suddenly he laughed, and the
others stared at him in surprise.

"No, I'm not crazy," he told them. "This is really funny; it had never
occurred to me that the ether-walls of all these ships make them
invisible. I can see them, of course, with this sub-ether spy, but they
can't see us! I knew that they should have overtaken us before this.
I've finally found them. They've passed us, and are now tacking around,
waiting for us to do something so that they can see us! They're heading
right into the Fleet--they think they're safe, of course, but what a
surprise they've got coming to them!"

But it was not only the pirates who were to be surprised. Long before
the pirate ship had come within extreme visibility range of the
Triplanetary Fleet it lost its invisibility and was starkly outlined
upon the lookout plates of the three fugitives. For a few seconds the
pirate craft seemed unchanged, then it began to glow redly, with a red
that seemed to become darker as it grew stronger. Then the sharp
outlines blurred, puffs of air burst outward, and the metal of the hull
became a viscous, fluid-like something, flowing away in a long, red
streamer into seemingly empty space. Costigan turned his ultra-gaze into
that space and saw that it was actually far from empty. There lay a vast
something, formless and indefinite even to his sub-etheral vision; a
something into which the viscid stream of transformed metal plunged.
Plunged and vanished.

Powerful interference blanketed his ultra-wave and howled throughout his
body; but in the hope that some parts of his message might get through
he called S