"Space," Bigman said, "I'm glad to get off that other tub. What do we do with it?"

"I'll have them send up a ship from Ceres to scoop it. » in.

Ceres was behind them, a hundred thousand miles away. In appearance it was about half the diameter of the Moon as seen from Earth.

Bigman said curiously, "How about letting me in on all this, Lucky? Why the sudden change of plans? I was heading out all by myself, the last I heard."

"There aren't any co-ordinates for you to head to," said Lucky. Grimly he told him the events of the last several hours.

Bigman whistled. "Then where are we going?"

"I'm not sure," said Lucky, "but we begin by aiming at the place where the hermit's rock ought to be now."

He studied the dials, and added, "And we leave here fast, too."

He meant fast. Acceleration on the Shooting Starr went high as velocity built up. Bigman and Lucky were pinned back to their diamagnetically cushioned chairs and the growing pressure spread evenly over their entire body surfaces. The oxygen concentration in the cabin was built up by the acceleration-sensitive air-purifier controls and allowed shallower breathing without oxygen starvation. The g-harness (g being the usual scientific symbol for acceleration) they both wore was light and did not hamper their movements, but under the stress of increasing velocity it stiffened and protected the bones, particularly the spine, from breaking. A nylotex-mesh girdle kept the abdominal viscera from undue harm.

In every respect the cabin accessories had been designed by experts at the Council of Science to allow of twenty to thirty per cent greater acceleration on the Shooting Starr than on even the most advanced vessels of the fleet.

Even on this occasion the acceleration, though high, was less than half of that of which the ship was capable.

When velocity leveled off, the Shooting Starr was five million miles from Ceres, and, if Lucky or Bigman had been interested in looking for it, they would have found it to have become, in appearance, merely a speck of light, dimmer than many of the stars.

Bigman said, "Say, Lucky, I've been wanting to ask you. Do you have your glimmer shield?"

Lucky nodded and Bigman looked grieved.

"Well, you big dumb ox," the little fellow said, "why in space didn't you take it with you when you went out pirate-hunting then?"

"I did have it with me," said Lucky calmly. "I've had it with me since the day the Martians gave it to me."

As Lucky and Bigman (but no one else in the Galaxy) knew, the Martians to whom Lucky referred were not the farm boys and ranchers of Mars. They were rather a race of immaterial creatures who were the direct descendants of the ancient intelligences that once inhabited the surface of Mars in the ages before it had lost its oxygen and water. Excavating huge caverns below Mars' surface by destroying cubic miles of rock, converting the matter so destroyed into energy and storing that energy for future use, they now lived in comfortable isolation. Abandoning their material bodies and living as pure energy, their existence remained unsuspected by Mankind. Only Lucky Starr had penetrated their fastnesses and as the one souvenir of that eerie trip* he had obtained what Bigman called the "glimmer shield."

Bigman's annoyance increased. "Well, if you had it, why didn't you use it? What's wrong with you?"

"You have the wrong idea of the shield, Bigman. It won't do everything. It won't feed me and wipe my lips when I'm through."

"I've seen what it can do. It can do plenty."

"It can, in certain ways. It can soak up all types of energy."

"Like the energy of a blaster bolt. You're not going to kick about that, are you?"

"No, I admit I'd be immune to blasters. The shield would soak up potential energy, too, if the mass of a body weren't too great or too small. For instance, a knife or an ordinary bullet couldn't penetrate, though the bullet might knock me down. A good sledge hammer would swing right through the shield, though, and even if it didn't its momentum would crush me. And what's more, molecules of air can go through the shield as if it weren't there because they're too small to be handled. I'm telling you this so that you'll understand that if I were wearing the shield and Dingo had broken my face-plate when we were both tangled up in space, I would have died anyway. The shield wouldn't have prevented the air in my suit from scattering away in a split second."

"If you had used it in the first place, Lucky, you wouldn't have had any trouble. Don't I remember when you used it on Mars?" Bigman chuckled at the reminiscence. "It glimmered all over you, smoky-like, only luminous, so you could just be seen in a haze. All except your face anyway. That was just a sheet of white light."

"Yes," said Lucky dryly, "I would have scared them. They would have hit at me with blasters and I wouldn't have been hurt. So they would have all high-tailed it off the Atlas, gone off about ten miles, and blasted the ship. I would have been stone dead. Don't forget that the shield is only a shield. It doesn't give me any offensive powers whatever."

"Aren't you ever going to use it again?" asked Bigman.

"When it's necessary. Not till then. If I use it too much, the effect would be lost. Its weaknesses would be found out and I would be just a target for anyone I came up against."

Lucky studied the instruments. Calmly he said, "Ready for acceleration again."

Bigman said, "Hey-"

Then, as he was pushed back into his seat, he found himself fighting for breath and could say nothing more.

The redness was rising to his eyes and he could feel the skin drawing backward as though it were trying to peel off his bones.

This time the Shooting Starrs acceleration was on full.

It lasted fifteen minutes. Toward the end Bigman was scarcely conscious. Then it relaxed and life crept back.

Lucky was shaking his head and panting for breath.

Bigman said, "Hey, that wasn't funny."

"I know," said Lucky.

"What's the idea? Weren't we going fast enough?"

"Not quite. But it's all right now. We've shaken them."

"Shaken whom?"

"Whoever was following us. We were being followed, Bigman, from the minute you stepped foot on the deck of the old Shooter. Look at the Ergometer."

Bigman did so. The Ergometer resembled the one on the Atlas in name only. The one on the Atlas had been a primitive model designed to pick up motor radiation for the purpose of releasing the lifeboats. That had been its only purpose. The Ergometer on the Shooting Starr could pick up the radiation pattern of a hyperatomic motor on ships no larger than an ordinary lifeboat and do it at a distance of better than two million miles.

Even now the inked line on the graphed paper jiggled very faintly, but periodically.

"That isn't anything," said Bigman.

"It was, a while ago. Look for yourself." Lucky unreeled the cylinder of paper that had already passed the needle. The jigglings grew deeper, more characteristic. "See that, Bigman?"

"It could be any ship. It could be a Ceres freighter."

"No. For one thing, it tried to follow us and did a good job of it, too, which means it had a pretty good Ergom-eter of its own. Besides that, did you ever see an energy pattern like this?"

"Not exactly like this, Lucky."

"I did, you see, in the case of the ship that boarded the Atlas. This Ergometer does a much better job of pattern analysis, but the resemblance is definite. The motor of the ship that's following us is of Sirian design."

"You mean it's Anton's ship."

"That or a similar one. It doesn't matter. We've lost them."