* *

Across the valley, bright in the noon sun lay the pine covered slopes of
the Argus mountains, and at his feet the green Mojave flowering with
orchards stretched far to the north and south. Between the trees, in the
center of the valley, the Sacramento River rolled southward in a
man-made bed of concrete and steel giving water and life to what had a
century before been dry dead earth.

There was a small outcropping of limestone near the cement walk, and he
stepped over to it and sat down. He would have been happy to rest and
enjoy for a few moments his escape and his triumph, but he had to let
the others know so that they might have hope.

He closed his eyes and groped across the stars toward Grismet. Almost
immediately he felt an impatient tug at his mind, strong because there
were many clamoring at once to be heard. He counted them. There were
seventeen. So one more had been captured since he had left Grismet.

"Be quiet," the told them. "I'll let you see, after a while. First I
have to reach the two of us that are still free."

Obediently, the seventeen were still, and he groped some more and found
another of his kind deep in an ice cave in the polar regions of Grismet.

"How goes it?" he asked.

The figure on Grismet lay stretched out at full length on the blue ice,
his eyes closed. He answered without moving: "They discovered my
radiation about an hour ago. Pretty soon, they'll start blasting through
the ice."

The one on Earth felt the chill despair of his comrade and let go. He
groped about again until he found the last one, the only other one left.
He was squatting in the cellar of a warehouse in the main city of
Grismet.

"Have they picked up your trail yet?" he asked.

"No," answered the one in the cellar. "They won't for a while. I've
scattered depots of radiation all through the town. They'll be some time
tracking them all down, before they can get to me."

In a flash of his mind, Hall revealed his escape and the one on Grismet
nodded and said: "Be careful. Be very careful. You are our only hope."

Hall returned then to the seventeen, and he said with his thoughts: "All
right, now you can look." Immobile in their darkness, they snatched at
his mind, and as he opened his eyes, they, too, saw the splendors of the
mountains and the valley, the blue sky, and the gold sun high overhead.

* * * * *

The new man was young, only twenty-six. He was lean and da