h her eight thousand colonists; fleeing like a hunted thing with her
communicators silenced and her drives moaning and thundering. Up in the
control room, Irene had been told, the needles of the dials danced
against the red danger lines day and night.

She lay in bed and listened to the muffled, ceaseless roar of the drives
and felt the singing vibration of the hull. _We should be almost safe by
now_, she thought. _Athena is only forty days away._

Thinking of the new life awaiting them all made her too restless to lie
still any longer. She got up, to sit on the edge of the bed and switch
on the light. Dale was gone--he had been summoned to adjust one of the
machines in the ship's X-ray room--and Billy was asleep, nothing showing
of him above the covers but a crop of brown hair and the furry nose of
his ragged teddy bear.

She reached out to straighten the covers, gently, so as not to awaken
him. It happened then, the thing they had all feared.

From the stern of the ship came a jarring, deafening explosion. The ship
lurched violently, girders screamed, and the light flicked out.

In the darkness she heard a rapid-fire _thunk-thunk-thunk_ as the
automatic guard system slid inter-compartment doors shut against
sections of the ship suddenly airless. The doors were still thudding
shut when another explosion came, from toward the bow. Then there was
silence; a feeling of utter quiet and motionlessness.

The fingers of fear enclosed her and her mind said to her, like the
cold, unpassionate voice of a stranger: _The Gerns have found us._

The light came on again, a feeble glow, and there was the soft, muffled
sound of questioning voices in the other compartments. She dressed, her
fingers shaking and clumsy, wishing that Dale would come to reassure
her; to tell her that nothing really serious had happened, that it had
not been the Gerns.

It was very still in the little compartment--strangely so. She had
finished dressing when she realized the reason: the air circulation
system had stopped working.

That meant the power failure was so great that the air regenerators,
themselves, were dead. And there were eight thousand people on the
_Constellation_ who would have to have air to live....

The _Attention_ buzzer sounded shrilly from the public address system
speakers that were scattered down the ship's corridors. A voice she
recognized as that of Lieutenant Commander Lake spoke:

"War was declared upon Earth by the G