"The Barons are fighting!" Hull Burrel cried to Gordon from the telestereo into which he was peering with flaming eyes. "God, look at the battle off the Cluster!"

"Now!" cried Gordon hoarsely, and threw shut the main release-switch. Pale, ghostly beams stabbed out from the prow of the Ethne toward the dim region of space ahead. Those pallid rays seemed almost to creep slowly forward, fanning out as they did so.

Gordon, Hull Burrel and Val Marlann crouched at the window frozen and incapable of movement as they looked ahead.

Then the massed specks in the radar screen that marked the position of the Cloud fleet's advancing line seemed to waver slightly. A flicker seemed to run through that area. "Nothing's happening!" Burrel groaned. "Nothing! The thing must be--"

A point of blackness had appeared far ahead. It grew and grew, pulsing and throbbing. And switfly it was a great, growing blot of blackness, not the blackness of mere absence of light but such living, quivering blackness as no living man had ever seen.

On the radar screen, the area that included half the Cloud fleet's advancing battle-line had been swallowed by darkness! For there was a black blot on the screen too, a blot from which radar rays recoiled.

"God in Heaven!" cried Val Arlann, shaking. "The Disruptor is destroying space itself in that area!"