rounded lower end appeared. It floated in the air.

Fran jerked the cord again. Another hole in the lake. Another round
metal thing rising slowly, one would even say peacefully into the
starlight. Fran, grinning happily, jerked the cord again and yet
again....

There were eight gigantic shining cylinders in the air when he stopped
and stood back, his eyes shining. A vast metal thing floated ponderously
near. A port opened and a voice called down in the language the children
used among themselves. Fran spoke back, remembering to turn on his
sensory communicator.

Fran talked briskly as if to himself. But it was standard
sensory-communication practice. After a long time he turned to Soames.

"My people say--" a pause--"thank you--" another pause, "and ask for
Zani and Mal and Hod."

"Tell them to make a column of themselves and float right here, going up
to ten thousand feet or so. Radars will pick them out. Planes will come
in the night to see what they are. They'll guess. I doubt very much that
they'll attack. Tell your people simply to keep them worried until we
come back."

Fran zestfully swarmed back into the helicopter. Soames told him:

"Turn off your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the
monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of
communications from the ships!"

Fran wriggled with excitement as the 'copter rose once more.

* * * * *

Soames had an odd feeling that all this could not be true. But it was,
down to the last least detail which had made it thinkable for him to
defy all his fellow-men to keep faith with four children whose lives and
errand he'd interfered with. The matter had been a very natural
oversight, at first.

Of course Soames had assumed that the children's civilization had been
one of very millions of people. A small city cannot establish or
maintain a great technological civilization. He had been right. He'd
assumed, even, that Fran's people were able to travel between planets.
Again he'd been right. But the thing he hadn't thought of was that the
development of transposition in time--and transposition in space would
come later--wouldn't occur to anybody unless there was absolutely no
other possible solution to the problem the Old Race faced. They wouldn't
have tried to solve it until the Fifth Planet burst and the doom of the
world they lived on was self-evident. They wouldn't have worked at it
until they re