She had beauty.

She wanted power.

* * * * *

In the early hours of the following morning, behind the cover of what
appeared to be a dense early morning fog but what actually was an
artificially produced fog, a team of Irwadi technicians swarmed all over
a battered Procyonian cruiser of three thousand tons. By mid-morning,
working swiftly and with all the tools and spare parts they would need,
they made the ship, called _Dog Star_, space-worthy.

Later that day, but still two hours before nightfall, Ramar Chind
arrived with a small crew of three Security Police. He had selected his
men carefully: they knew how to handle a spaceship, they knew how to
fight, they were quite ruthless. He thought Garr Symm would be pleased.

Symm did not arrive until just before nightfall. He was very agitated
when he came. Ramar Chind, too, was eager. What would happen within the
next several hours, he realized, might be beyond his ken, but he still
recognized its importance. And, being an opportunist, he would pounce on
whatever he found of value to himself....

Several hours after the setting of the Irwadi primary had ushered in the
cold night, Margot Dennison, Ramsey and Vardin arrived at the Graveyard
and made their way at once to the _Enterprise_. They went inside swiftly
and in a very few minutes prepared the thousand-tonner for blastoff.
Ramsey's mouth was dry. He could barely keep the thoughts of proto-man
from his mind. If Margot read them....

"Centauri here we come," he said, just to talk.

"Centauri," said Margot.

But of course, she had another destination in mind.

Several hundred yards across the Graveyard, watching, waiting, the
occupants of _Dog Star_ were armed to the teeth.

Ramsey sat at the controls. Vardin stood behind him nervously. The space
trip from Vega to Irwadi was probably the only one she had ever taken.
Margot sat, quite relaxed, in the co-pilot's chair.

"I still can't believe we're not going to feel anything," Vardin said in
her soft, shy voice.

"Haven't you ever been through hyper-space before?" Margot asked the
Vegan girl.

"Just once."

"In normal space," Ramsey explained, "we feel acceleration and
deceleration because the increase or decrease in velocity is experienced
at different micro-instants by all the cells of our body. In hyper-space
the velocity is felt simultaneously in all parts of the ship, including
all parts of us. We become weightles