all right but had to take
things more slowly.

He heard her voice but paid little attention. He sat in the chair and
blankly watched the two men who hung over the table and its flow of
brilliant symbols. Vaillant seemed to tighten up more and more as the
moments passed, and there was still about him the look of a coiled
spring but now the spring seemed to be wound to the breaking-point.
Webber, the tall man with the tough face, watched the fleeting symbols
and his face was stony.

"Here we go," he muttered, and both he and Vaillant looked up at the
blank black screen on the wall.

Kieran looked too. There was nothing. Then, in an instant, the blackness
vanished from the screen and it framed a vista of such cosmic, stunning
splendor that Kieran could not grasp it.

* * * * *

Stars blazed like high fires across the screen, loops and chains and
shining clots of them. This was not too different from the way they had
looked from Wheel Five. But what was different was that the starry
firmament was partly blotted out by vast rifted ramparts of blackness,
ebon cliffs that went up to infinity. Kieran had seen astronomical
photographs like this and knew what the blackness was.

Dust. A dust so fine that its percentage of particles in space would be
a vacuum, on Earth. But, here where it extended over parsecs of space,
it formed a barrier to light. There was a narrow rift here between the
titan cliffs of darkness and he--the ship he was in--was fleeing across
that rift.

* * * * *

The screen abruptly went black again. Kieran remained sitting and
staring at it. That incredible fleeting vision had finally impressed the
utter reality of all this upon his mind. They, this ship, were far from
Earth--very far, in one of the dust-clouds in which they were trying to
lose pursuers. This was real.

"--will have got another fix on us as we crossed, for sure," Vaillant
was saying, in a bitter voice. "They'll have the net out for us--the
pattern will be shaping now and we can't slip through it."

"We can't," said Webber. "The ship can't. But the flitter can, with
luck."

They both looked at Kieran. "He's the important one," Webber said. "If a
couple of us could get him through--"

"No," said Paula. "We couldn't. As soon as they caught the ship and
found the flitter gone, they'd be after him."

"Not to Sako," said Webber. "They'd never figure that we'd take him to