s a shame I couldn't get the
one on Earth.... She would have suddenly materialized, bloody, twisted,
wrenched, turned inside out--a beautiful corpse; that's what we should
do with earthlings, and with traitors.

**Lycan: Hurry with your charges.**

**One more week, Elder. And they will be ready to attack!**

CHAPTER V

The thing Walt first noticed was the hugeness of space around his tiny,
falling ship. Through the viewplate above him--he was supine--the vast,
star-set blackness seemed infinite, seemed to suck his mind out of his
body until it was connected only by a tenuous thread. He had seen space
from the great wheel that was dwindling behind him; but never before had
its immediacy been impressed on him with such force: here, it was an
intimate wrapping, clutching at him from all sides.

He had pointed out as nearly as he could determine it from brief,
telepathic contact (the aliens showed him how to center on her) Julia's
location on the planet. The aliens had promised to land him in an
unpopulated area on the same part of the continent. The aliens' thoughts
did not come through the shielding around their space station; nor did
the thoughts of his compartment-mates. For the first time in his life,
he was terribly alone.

Earth grew in the viewplate; expanding majestically to obliterate the
surrounding space, it grew shimmery along its almost regular
circumference. The orbit of his saucer-shaped ship flattened into a
great spiral. The ship twisted around the Earth from shadow to light and
then into shadow again as if it were attached to the loose end of a
piece of string being wound up by the slowly turning planet. Gravity
pressed his body, crushed him; a sudden, sickening drop left him
weightless.

The aliens maneuvered his ship carefully. Walt could not--as the aliens
could--be immersed in a liquid tank to make possible instantaneous
changes of direction. They let him down tenderly.

_Hello_, Julia thought brightly.

It was frightening. Here was a Lyrian whose mind had pierced even the
wheel's shielding! How could he hope to kill her?

He stared at the approaching planet, and his hands tightened beneath the
pressing layers of the acceleration cocoon that enfolded him.

But I, he thought: I was able to contact her through the shielding, too.
I was the only one who did; nobody else reported her. It's all right:
she's no stronger than I am.

_I know you're there_, she thought.

I'll wait to a