"Of course they are," snapped Brave. He too had risen, and stood like an age-old oak beside the quavering poplar that was McEldownie. "Whose would they be?" he reasoned. "Do you suppose any country could manufacture those things without our men on Albertus spying them out?" "I tell you they aren't our ships!" cried Jim, taking the Indian by the lapels. "I know our designs up and down, and those aren't ours! Tell him, Mariner." "He's right," said Don, white as paper. "The superstructure's all wrong. And they're bigger, I think, than ours." "Don't forget that Homo superior, or his cousins from the space lanes, may have changed the plans without letting you in on it," said Bill Thihling bitterly. "Great God! Nobody but a callous, egotistical mutant or alien, unacquainted with pain and insensitive to our safety, would fly a squadron of virtually untested disks over a crowded city. This is misanthropy with a vengeance!" Mac groaned. "You bumbling dinkey engines," he said, "can't you get off that one track? I tell you these things don't come from Project Star--they don't even come from Earth!" Win spoke for the first time. She was still seated, the cat cradled against her breast. "I think you're right," she said. "I feel it; you're right. Those aren't human beings in those ships. They're from black space somewhere. They know we are reaching out for the stars and they've come to stop us." Her tone was level and wholly undramatic. "We'd be a menace, rampaging through the systems. They won't let us begin. Their spies here, Grady and his ilk, have called them down to stop us." Brave and Alan frowned at each other. Each asked the other wordlessly, Where are these two getting such wild conceptions? What do they see--what do they _know_, that we don't? * * * * * The saucers returned, in a different formation this time, like a V of geese. Geese made of glittering blue-silver metal, round geese traveling at eight hundred miles an hour. They roared overhead: soundlessly, yes, but with so swift and terrible a movement that one could call it nothing but a silent roar. In that instant Alan, staring upward, felt his convictions dissolve. Mac was right. He did not know enough about the design of Project Star's disks to say that these were different; but he knew suddenly that there was an alien _feel_ to these things, an aura of irrelation, a stupendous pulsation that pervaded the senses and forced the knowledge on him that here was nothing terrestrial, nothing human or even superhuman.