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numb reply. The gloved hands moved on the singed controls. Fair Maid vanished.
    Jim sat back wearily in his pilot’s chair. Hammering into his ears came the voice of Raoul Penard, now crooning another verse of his battle song….
    â€¦Come all you beeg Canada man. Who want find work on Meeshegan, Dere’s beeg log drive all troo our lan’, You sure fin’ work on Meesh —
    In a sudden reflex of rage, Jim’s hand slapped down on a button, cutting off in midword the song from La Chasse Gallerie .
    â€œJim!”
    The word was like a whip cracking across his back. Jim started awake to the fact of his passenger-gunner behind him.
    â€œWhat?” he asked.
    â€œI think I’ve got my second wind in this race,” answered the even, cold voice of Mary. “Meanwhile, how about turning Penard back on? My job’s to record everything I can get from him, and I can’t do that with the talk beam between his ship and ours shut off.”
    â€œThe Fair Maid ’s gunner just died—”
    â€œTurn the talk beam on!”
    Jim reached out and turned it on, wondering a little at himself. I should feel like shooting her at this moment, he thought. Why don’t I? Penard’s voice sang at him once again.
    â€œLook,” Jim began. “When a woman dies and a ship may be lost—”
    â€œHave you looked at Penard’s ship, Major?” interrupted the voice of Mary. “Take a look. Then maybe you’ll understand why I want the talk beam on just as long as there’s any use.”
    Jim turned and looked at the screen that showed the cone-shaped vessel.
    He stared.
    If La Chasse Gauerie had been badly cut up before, she was a floating chunk of scrap now. She had been slashed deep in half a dozen directions by the light beams of the Laagi ships. And the old-fashioned ceramet material of her hull, built before collapsed metals had been possible, had been opened up like cardboard under the edge of red-hot knives. Jim stared, hearing the voice of Penard singing in his ears, and an icy trickle went down his perspiration-soaked spine.
    â€œHe can’t be alive,” Jim heard himself saying. If a hit that did not even penetrate the collapsed metal hull of the Fair Maid could turn that ship’s interior into a charred, if workable, area—what must those light-weapons of the enemy have done to the interior of the old ship he looked at now? But Raoul still sang from there his song about lumbering in Meeshegan.
    â€œâ€”Nobody could be alive in that,” Jim said. “I was right. It must be just his semianimate control system parroting him and running the ship. Even at that, it’s a miracle it’s still working—”
    â€œWe don’t know,” Mary’s voice cut in on him. “And until we know we have to assume it’s Raoul himself, still alive. After all, his coming back at all is an impossible miracle. If that could happen, it could happen he’s still alive in that ship now. Maybe he’s picked up some kind of protection we don’t know about.”
    Jim shook his head, forgetting that probably Mary could not see this silent negative. It was not possible that Penard was alive. But he roused himself back to his duty. He had a job to do.
    His fingers began to dance over the black buttons in their ranks before him, working out the situation, planning his next move.
    â€œK formation,” he said automatically to the other ships, but did not even glance at the telltale sphere to make sure they obeyed correctly. Slowly, the situation took form. He was down one ship, from five to four of them, and that reduced the number of practical fighting and maneuvering formations by a factor of better than three. And there was something else….
    â€œMary,” he said slowly.
    â€œYes, Jim?”
    â€œI want your opinion on something,” said Jim. “When we jumped out of the fight area just now, it was a