"They are insubstantial creatures," said Foster, "yet they can endure the vacuum of space. I can only surmise that they followed the life boat down." "They were tailing you?" "Yes; but I have no idea why they pursued me. They're harmless creatures in the natural state, used to seek out the rare fugitive from justice on Vallon. They can be attuned to the individual; thereafter, they follow him and mark him out for capture." "Say, what were you: a big-time racketeer on Vallon?" * * * * * "The journal is frustratingly silent as to my Vallonian career," said Foster. "But this whole matter of the unexplained inter-galactic voyage and the evidence of violence aboard the ship make me wonder whether I was being exiled for crimes done in the Two Worlds." "So they sicked the Hunters on you?" I said. "But why did they hang around at Stonehenge all this time?" "There was a trickle of power feeding the screens," said Foster. "They need a source of electrical energy to live; until a hundred years ago it was the only one on the planet." "How did they get down into the shaft without opening it up?" "Given time, they pass easily through porous substances. But, of course, last night, when I came on them after their long fast, they simply burst through in their haste." "Okay. What happened next?--after you buried the man." "The journal tells that I was set upon by natives, men who wore the hides of animals. One of their number entered the ship. He must have moved the drive lever. It lifted, leaving me marooned." "So those were his bones we found in the boat," I mused: "the ones with the bear's-tooth necklace. I wonder why he didn't come into the ship." "Undoubtedly he did. But remember the skeleton we found just inside the landing port? That must have been a fairly fresh and rather gory corpse at the time the savage stepped aboard. It probably seemed to him all too clear an indication of what lay in store for himself if he ventured further. In his terror he must have retreated to the boat to wait, and there starved to death." "He was stranded in your world, and you were stranded in his." "Yes," said Foster. "And then, it seems, I lived among the brutemen and came to be their king. I waited there by the landing-ring through many years in the hope of rescue. Because I did not age as the natives did, I was worshipped as a god. I would have built a signalling device, but there were no pure metals, nothing I could use. I tried to teach them, but it was a work of centuries." "But how could one go on living--for hundreds of years? Are you people supermen that live forever?" "Not forever. But the natural span of a human life is very great. Among your people, there is a wasting disease from which you all die young." "That's no disease," I said. "You just naturally get old and die." "The human mind is a magnificent instrument," Foster said; "not meant to wither quickly." "Why didn't you catch this 'disease'?"