There was the tiny form which looked so amazingly like a duplicate of the Starshine. It was actually a thin layer of innumerable turns of spring-wire. On any planet it would have collapsed of its own weight. Here in space it looked remarkably convincing.
But the three in the Starshine did not look at it. They looked at the shape that had come alongside it and made fast with magnetic grapples that distorted the thin decoy wildly—the shape that gave no sign of any activity or any motion or any life.
That shape was a monster space-ship a thousand feet long. It looked as if it bulged with apparatus of death. It was gigantic. It was deadly.
"Our trick worked," said Kim uneasily. "We should begin to feel uncomfortable, you and I, in minutes—if only our engines keep running!"
He spoke to the Mayor of Steadheim. Almost as he spoke, a tiny tingling began all over his body. As the ship went on, that tingling grew noticeably stronger.
"What—"
"We've no weapons," said Kim, "nor time to devise them. But when we were slaves on the planets we came from we were held enslaved by a circuit that could torture us or paralyze us at the will of our rulers. The Disciplinary Circuit. Remember?
"I put a Disciplinary-Circuit generator in that little decoy ship. I took a suggestion from what our friends yonder did to the fighting beams. I tuned the Disciplinary Circuit to affect any man—but no woman—within its range.
"The generator went on when she grappled the decoy. Every man in it should be helpless. If it stands like that, we'd be paralyzed too if we went near. But not Dona."
The tingling was quite strong. It was painful. Presently it would be excruciating. It would be completely impossible for any man within fifty miles of the decoy space-ship to move a muscle.