"Where," Mantelish said, "is the ship going to be while we're sleeping?"

"Subspace," said the Commissioner. He saw their expressions. "Don't worry! I'll put her on a wide orbit and I'll stick out every alarm on board. I'll also sleep in the control chair. But in case somebody gets here early, we've got to be around to tell them about that space termite trick."

Trigger hadn't expected she would be able to sleep, not where they were. But afterwards she couldn't even remember getting stretched out all the way on the bunk.

She woke up less than an hour later, feeling very uncomfortable. Repulsive had been talking to her.

She sat up and looked around the dark cabin with frightened eyes. After a moment, she got out of the bunk and went up the passage toward the lounge and the control section.

Holati Tate was lying slumped back in his chair, eyes closed, breathing slowly and evenly. Trigger put out a hand to touch his shoulder and then drew it back. She glanced up for a moment at the plasmoid station in the screen, seeming to turn slowly as they went orbiting by it. She noticed that one of the space flares they'd planted there had gone out, or else it had been plucked away by a passing twister's touch. She looked away quickly again, turned and went restlessly back through the lounge, and up the passage, toward the cabins. She went by the two suits of space armor at the lock without looking at them. She opened the door to Mantelish's cabin and looked inside. The professor lay sprawled across the bunk in his clothes, breathing slowly and regularly.

Trigger closed his door again. Lyad might be wakeful, she thought. She crossed the passage and unlocked the door to the Ermetyne's cabin. The lights in the cabin were on, but Lyad also lay there placidly asleep, her face relaxed and young looking.

Trigger put her fist to her mouth and bit down hard on her knuckles for a moment. She frowned intensely at nothing. Then she closed and locked the cabin door, went back up the passage and into the control room. She sat down before the communicator, glanced up once more at the plasmoid station in the screen, got up restlessly and went over to the Commissioner's chair. She stood there, looking down at him. The Commissioner slept on.

Then Repulsive said it again.

"No!" Trigger whispered fiercely. "I won't! I can't! You can't make me do it!"

There was a stillness then, In the stillness, it was made very clear that nobody intended to make her do anything.

And then the stillness just waited.

She cried a little.

So this was it.

"All right," she said.

The armor suit's triple light-beam blazed into the wide, low, black, wet-looking mouth rushing toward her. It was much bigger than she had thought when looking at it from the ship. Far behind her, the fire needles of the single gun pit which her passage to the station had aroused still slashed mindlessly about. They weren't geared to stop suits, and they hadn't come anywhere near her. But the plasmoids looked geared to stop suits.

They were swarming in clusters in the black mouth like maggots in a rotting skull. Part of the swarms had spilled out over the lips of the mouth, clinging, crawling, rippling swiftly about. Trigger shifted the flight controls with the fingers of one hand, dropping a little, then straightening again. She might be coming in too fast. But she had to get past that mass at the opening.

Then the black mouth suddenly yawned wide before her. Her left hand pressed the gun handle. Twin blasts stabbed ahead, blinding white, struck the churning masses, blazed over them. They burned, scattered, exploded, and rolled back, burning and exploding, in a double wave to meet her.

"Too fast!" Repulsive said anxiously. "Much too fast!"

She knew it. But she couldn't have forced herself to do it slowly. The armor suit slammed at a slant into a piled, writhing, burning hardness of plasmoid bodies, bounced upward. She went over and over, yanking down all the way on the flight controls. She closed her eyes for a moment.

When she opened them again, the suit hung poised a little above black uneven flooring, turned back half toward the entrance mouth. A black ceiling was less than twenty feet above her head.

The plasmoids were there. The suit's light beams played over the massed, moving ranks: squat bodies and sinuous ones, immensities that scraped the ceiling, stalked limbs and gaping nutcracker jaws, blurs of motion her eyes couldn't step down to define into shapes. Some still blazed with her guns' white fire. The closest were thirty feet away.

They stayed there. They didn't come any closer.