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The sky was harsh with the flare of rocket jets when Captain Ralph Langford emerged from his deep space cruiser on the Mars City landing field. There was a girl standing alone at the far end of the field, and for a moment Langford thought it might be Joan, irrational as the thought was. Of course, Joan couldn't be here; he was to see her at the hospital. He started across the field, blinking in the glare, his eyes shining with a warm gratefulness to be home again; as he approached the solitary figure, he could see it was not Joan, though there was a resemblance. He was so engrossed that he didn't notice the tall, eagle-eyed young Patrol officer who came striding toward him, until he heard the man's voice.

"You're under arrest, sir!" the youth said, his hand whipping to his visor. "Commander Gurney's orders."

Langford looked up suddenly, then stiffened in belligerent protest. "Hold on, Lieutenant! You can't arrest me and march me off to jail like a common criminal. Commission regulations! How long have you worn those stripes, youngster?"

The youth's eyes were respectful, sympathetic; he did not appear to be offended. "I'm sorry, sir," he said firmly. "Commander Gurney went before the Commission and had you certified as irresponsible."

Langford flushed angrily. "So that's it," he grunted.

The Patrol officer hesitated. He had prepared what he intended to say, but the fame of the big man facing him had reached sunward to Mercury, and outward to Pluto's frozen tundras.

Langford's fist lashed out suddenly, catching the youth flush on the jaw, and crumpling him to his knees. The girl, who had been a silent witness up to now, gasped, then turned and ran like a frightened rabbit. Langford did not stop to apologize. Rumor had it that deep space officers bore charmed lives, but Langford knew as he broke into a run that his life hung by a thread that might at any moment turn crimson.

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No part of the field was unguarded. If the guards had orders to withhold their fire he saw a desperate chance of outwitting them; but if they had orders to blast, his fate was already sealed. As he ran he had a vision of himself sinking down in a welter of blood and blackness, his ears deafened by the hollow chant of concussion weapons. He saw himself lying spread out on the landing field, the taste of death in his mouth, the air above him filled with a harsh, eerie crackling.

He ran faster, ran like a man bemazed, his eyes filled with dancing motes that kept cascading down both sides of his oxygen mask. He was a hundred feet from the ship when he became aware that a dozen armed guards had emerged from shadows at the edge of the field and were converging upon him.

Angry curses whipped through the night and the field seemed to tilt as the guards came racing toward him. Far off in the darkness a siren wailed.

Langford suddenly realized that he was becoming light-headed from too much oxygen intake; his head was filled with a dull roaring, and seemed to be expanding. It was filled with flashing lights as well as sound, and was leaving his shoulders as he ran.

He had a sudden impulse to laugh and shout, to whoop at how ridiculous it was. His head had left his shoulders and was spinning about in the air. But before he could grasp the tube which was flooding his brain with hilarity, armed guards were all about him, raising their weapons to cover him and shouting at him to raise his arms.

Unfortunately he couldn't seem to move his arms. When he made the effort he went plunging and skidding over the ramp with running figures on both sides of him. He was skating, cutting capers on ice. Fantastic and incredible capers. Then the ice was inside his skull, swelling up thick; his heels were together when the lights in his head went out.

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When the lights came on again Langford found himself stumbling forward into a blank-walled room with a steady pressure at his back. At first he thought the room was a cell, but when his vision adjusted itself to the glare he saw that he was facing a seated man whose head seemed to be dancing in the air.

"Here he is, Commander!" a harsh voice said. "He blacked out, but that didn't stop him from putting up a terrific fight!"

Langford had no recollection of putting up a fight, but the guard's jaw was bruised and swollen, which seemed to indicate that a struggle had taken place. A massive desk swam into view and the head of the seated man settled down on his shoulders.

Langford blinked. Facing him in the cold light was the supreme commander of the Solar Patrol, a thin, hollow-cheeked man of fifty whose eyes behind narrowed lids glittered as cold as glass.

Commander Gurney's immobility was not unlike the roll of thunder in a vacuum. There was sound and fury to it, and yet not a muscle of his face moved as he dismissed the guard with a curt nod, and waited for the massive door behind Langford to clang shut.

The instant silence settled down over the room Commander Gurney came to life. "You're under arrest, Langford," he said, quietly. "If you've anything to say in your own defense you'd better start talking. I can spare you—" the patrol commander glanced at his wrist watch—"Exactly twenty minutes."

"Good enough!" Langford grunted. All the muscles of his gaunt face seemed to pull together as he seated himself. For an instant he remained motionless, his eyes troubled and angry, as if he could not quite accept the fact that he had been deprived of his command by the irate man opposite him.

The two men who sat facing each other in the cold light were sharply divergent types. Langford was a man of enormous strength and a temper that was just a little dangerous when it got out of control. He had never once failed in his duty and the inner discipline which he had imposed on himself showed in his features, which were as tight as a drum. But beneath his rough exterior Langford concealed the sensitive imagination of a poet, and an immense kindliness which sometimes overflowed in strange ways, embarrassing him more than he cared to admit.

Commander Gurney had never experienced such embarrassment; he had imposed his will on the Solar Patrol by becoming an absolute slave to efficiency at considerable detriment to his health. There was something rapacious and hornetlike about him, something ceaselessly alert. Now he sat regarding Langford with a stinging contempt in his stare, poised for the attack, his harsh features mirroring his thoughts like an encephalograph. "Well?" he prodded.

Langford wet his dry lips. Reaching inside his resplendent uniform, he removed a small, shining object which he set down at the edge of his superior's desk. "They shot this out at us when I ordered them to stand by for boarding," he said. "It was contained in a small, translucent capsule which I picked up with a magnetic trawl. It's just a model in miniature, but take a good look at it, sir; would you care to make the acquaintance of a creature like that in the flesh?"

Commander Gurney's eyes widened and his mouth twitched slightly. "In the name of all that's unholy, Langford, what is it?" he muttered.

Langford shook his head. "I wish I knew, sir. It looks quite a bit like a praying mantis. A little, metallic praying mantis six inches tall. But it doesn't behave like one!"

---

The statuette on Gurney's desk seemed chillingly lifelike in the cold light. It had been fashioned with flawless craftsmanship; its upraised forelimbs were leaf green, its abdomen salmon pink, and its gauzy wings shone with a dull, metallic luster as Langford turned it carefully about.

Gurney couldn't help noticing, with a little shudder, that its mouth-parts consisted of a cutting mandible, and a long, coiled membrane like the ligula of a honeybee. Huge, compound eyes occupied the upper half of the metal insect's face.

Gurney's hand had gone out, and was about to close on the little statue; but something in Langford's stare made him change his mind. As his hand whipped back he fastened his gaze on Langford's face with the ire of a peevish child denied access to a jampot.

"What in blazes has that to do with your failure to obey orders?" he demanded, with explosive vehemence. "That ship must have used an interstellar space-warp drive to appear out of nowhere in the middle of the Asteroid Belt. And you deliberately let it slip away from you!"

Langford shut his eyes before replying. He saw again the myriad stars of space, the dull red disk of Mars and the far-off gleam of the great outer planets. He saw the luminous hull of the alien ship looming up out of the void. An instant before, the viewpane had been filled with a sprinkling of very distant stars with a faint nebulosity behind them. The ship had appeared with the suddenness of an image forming on a screen, out of the dark matrix of empty space.

Langford leaned forward, a desperate urgency in his stare. "Mere alienage doesn't justify the crime of murder, sir!" he said. "Attacking an alien race without weighing the outcome would have been an act of criminal folly, charged with great danger to ourselves."

Commander Gurney shook his head in angry disagreement. "Just how would you define murder, Langford?" he demanded. "If a highly intelligent buzzsaw came at you would you bare your throat?"

Langford ignored the question. "Violence breeds violence, sir," he said, with patient insistence. "Suppose the shoe were on the other foot. Suppose the inhabitants of another planet attacked you without giving you a chance to prove your friendliness?"

Langford's eyes held a dogged conviction. "Remember, sir—to issue a warning is an act of forbearance. No reasonable man could mistake a warning for an aggressive act. If their weapons are superior to ours, or they are superior to us in other, truly terrifying ways, they proved their friendliness by warning us. Would you have had me attack their ship without studying that warning?"