get 'take heart mortals' from?" The lieutenant glanced at Pinkham. "It may seem little, but it's minutiae that will give us clues to his nature, and therefore how to fight him. Take heart, mortals, after all. Who talks like that?"

"You're right," said Pink wearily. "It's little things we've got to look for. Like, evidently, gin bottles."

"Item," said Jerry, who was eating a sandwich. "He's composed of something alien to any life we know. Gas? I doubt it. Atomic shock would disseminate gas. Are his molecules loose and do they edge aside for obstacles, compress together when he wants to shrink, and so on? Possible. But anyhow, he's different—and so far as we know, invulnerable."

"How did he gimmick the guns?" asked Calico, a note of desperation in his voice. "We picked them up as soon as he'd gone, and they wouldn't fire."

"Same way he gimmicked the intercom, the life-scanner, the space drive. Known hereafter as Unknown Method One."

"Another item," went on Jerry. "He talks English without using a lingoalter. Thus, probably, he's telepathic. 'Take heart mortals' he might have grubbed out of somebody's subconscious."

"It adds up to this," said Pink. "We're helpless against him. Granting this, I say let's go get him."

It made no sense, it was the gesture of fools in love with death or of madmen battling their own futility; but every officer there shouted, "Right!" Except for Joe Silver.

"I say, sit tight and wait," he said. "Something will happen. There's no use committing suicide."

"If he wants us alive, and we can't fight him, I think we're better off dead," said Jerry through his teeth.

"Hell. Where there's life there's hope."

"I suppose you're right," said Pink slowly. His muscles ached, his hands grasped ceaselessly at the air; he was a man of action, his desire for combat throttled by incapability. "Twenty-some hours before the other ships get here. If our deductions are on the beam, he won't do anything till then. He wants the whole armada."

Then, with a snarl of static, the intercom came to life.

At first they heard a jumble of voices. "What's wrong?" "Nothing works...." "Are all the officers dead?" It was the crew, beyond the barriers of the mutiny gates, evidently trying to get into communication. Over and over one voice said, "Hello, Captain Pinkham. Come in, Captain Pinkham."

Pink took two strides and flipped the switch of the visiograph. Tuning it first to one crew station and then another, he told them succinctly what bad happened. "Don't panic, for God's sake. The mutiny gates are for your protection. If they work, you may be able to do something later, regardless of what happens to us."

Their somber faces looked out of the screen at him. "Let us in, Captain," pleaded one big repairman. "We'll mob the critter."

"No use, Jackson. Stand by." He turned the dial of the visiograph into the officers' section, scanned one room after another. No alien being appeared. "I wonder if he's in here with us?" said Pink half-aloud.

Jerry came to him. "I have an idea," he said quietly. Then he whispered at length into Pinkham's ear.

"It won't work. He knows what he's doing."

"How do we know that? If he needs us, he's ignorant of spaceships. Look at the intercom—he turned it off, by some means, then turned it on when he found out what it was. The space drive must have been easy to guess at; likewise the life-scanner. But the intercom's a lot of complex machinery that only adds up to a television-telephone communication system. However he snarls the stuff, it's instantaneous and simple for him to do. I think he just took a crack at everything that looked important. Now he's experimenting, learning the ship, finding out what he threw out of joint. Obviously he doesn't give a damn if we talk to the crew!"

"You could be right."

"So if I do what I want to, it'll confuse hell out of him. It may give us an advantage. And we'll certainly learn something."

"It's worth a try." Pink looked at Jerry, his closest friend. "I'll send Silver to do it," he said.

Jerry shook his lean head. "This is my baby, Pink." Then he opened the door and went out, closing it behind him.

Pinkham said levelly, "Daley, come here." He whispered the plan into his lieutenant's ear. Daley said admiringly, "Good deal. And I think that's sense—he can't know much about the ship. I'll bet he was hiding in that bottle, casing Sparks's equipment and learning how to operate it. The quick look he got at the rest of us on our jobs before he started playing hob must have given him the barest, scantiest idea of things. So Jerry's notion could work."

"Or it could blow up," said Pink dismally. "Go tell the others. Whisper it, in case our guest is in here." He struggled briefly with his deepest feelings. "Don't tell Circe. We can't be sure of her yet."

"Roger." Daley left him alone at the intercom. Pinkham set the dial to show the large room toward which Jerry was making his way....

Somewhere beyond their ken, the incredible beast from the void made another decision, or tried another experiment; and the life-scanner flickered into working order again. Joe Silver saw it first. Its screen blinked, then its alarm buttons glowed vividly. Without the ship, at a vast distance but approaching rapidly, were an untold number of organic entities, life-sources that reacted upon the scanner like approaching aircraft on a radar set. They could be spaceships, slugjet suits, or anything that contained the intangible thing called life. And the sister ships of the Elephant's Child were still too far away to register.

"Great Jupiter!" bellowed Joe Silver, pointing. "What now?"

CHAPTER VIII

O. O. Jerry Jones crept along the last ramp. Why the devil was he skulking like this? Habit, he grinned ruefully to himself; the habit of primitive man who crouched and slunk in the presence of danger, no matter what kind.

And the old preservation instinct was also giving him all sorts of reasons to knock this silly business off, and go back to the protection, however illusory, of the control room. For instance, said the sly instinct, if this alien is telepathic, as you so neatly proved to yourself, then doesn't he know all that you and your pals know about a spaceship?

Shut up, Jerry told himself. I was wrong. He can't be telepathic, or he wouldn't bother to keep us alive after he's combed our brains.

"Couldn't he have some physical use for you all?" said the instinct.

Get thee behind me, Satan, he growled in his mind.

He opened the door of the room he was seeking.

Where to start? One wall was banked with books; never mind them. Another wall was covered with strange-looking projections, tubes and spouts and wheels and levers, behind a long table of plastikoid. There? Good enough.

He had a momentary pang as he picked up a spanner from the rack of tools by the door....

Then he was across the room and smashing wildly at levers, spouts, wall tanks, faucets; beating metal into scrap, crushing shining aluminum to scarred uselessness; he did not rest his arm until the whole wall was a ruin of beaten metal and broken glass. Then he turned his attention to the third wall.

Here was a giant turntable, rack on rack of shellacked alloy discs, mysterious-appearing charts and cabalistic signs. These he wrecked as methodically and ruthlessly as he had the first, but now there were tears glistening in his eyes. He ended the destruction with a moan of sorrow.

He paused to snap on the intercom. Pink's worry-lined face appeared. "How'm I doing?" Jerry asked his captain.

"Great so far. Calico is crying like a child."

"I have news for you," Jerry said. "So am I." Then he turned to the last wall. Before it spread a long array of mechanical devices: large boxes on spindly legs, with glassed tops and brilliant colors splashed across their surfaces; taller, narrower cases