s per second; it would take us quite a while to slow
down, stop, and go in the other direction. There's a nice, big galactic
nebula right in front of us, about three days away--six million light
years. Any objections to heading for that?"

The rest looked at the glowing point of the nebula. Out in space, a star
is a hard, brilliant, dimensionless point of light. But a nebula glows
with a faint mistiness; they are so far away that they never have any
bright glow, such as stars have, but they are so vast, their dimensions
so great, that even across millions of light years of space they appear
as tiny glowing discs with faint, indistinct edges. As the men looked
out of the clear lux metal windows, they saw the tiny blur of light on
the soft black curtain of space.

It was as good a course as any, and the ship's own inertia recommended
it; they had only to redirect the ship with greater accuracy.

Setting the damaged gyroscopes came first, however. There were a number
of things about the ship that needed readjustment and replacement after
the strain of escaping from the giant star.

After they had made a thorough inspection Arcot said:

"I think we'd best make all our repairs out here. That flame that hit us
burned off our outside microphone and speaker, and probably did a lot of
damage to the ray projectors. I'd rather not land on a planet unarmed;
the chances are about fifty-fifty that we'd be greeted with open cannon
muzzles instead of open arms."

The work inside was left to Arcot and Fuller, while Morey and Wade put
on spacesuits and went out onto the hull.

They found surprisingly little damage--far less than they had expected.
True, the loudspeaker, the microphone, and all other instruments made of
ordinary matter had been burned off clean. They didn't even have to
clean out the spaces where they had been recessed into the wall. At a
temperature of ten thousand degrees, the metals had all boiled
away--even tungsten boils at seven thousand degrees, and all other
normal matter boils even more easily.

The ray projectors, which had been adjusted for the high power necessary
to stop a sun in its orbit, were readjusted for normal power, and the
heat beams were replaced.

After nearly four hours work, everything had been checked, from relays
and switch points to the instruments and gyroscopes. Stock had been
taken, and they found they were running low on replacement parts. If
anything more happened, they would ha