Then it was gone. As suddenly as it had come. The office regained its normal perspective. The bright sunlight, reflected now from the tall buildings across the Great Canal, erased the ragged, black hole out of his consciousness. Painfully he righted the chair and sank into it. His lungs felt pressed in and stale, like the inside of a folded blanket. He took a deep breath, shoved his wet palms hard at the top of the desk. _Uarnl._ The nightmare. It came back to him as dreams rarely do: down to its last beastly detail. A dream of fear and peril--a running dream--and not a dream, after all. _Uarnl._ He looked at the corner of the room, at the colorful throw rug. It lay there under the sun, brighter than it had been, as if a pane of glass had been lifted from it. After a while he got up and went to the door of Miss Kal's office. She looked up vaguely, concealing a small, resigned lizard under her jacket. "Miss Kal," Joe said blindly, "do you have my morning papers?" He took the facsimiles back to his desk, walking slowly, afraid to get there and sit down and open them. The nightmare; the first aborted attempt. Sarah and Kent--approaching him separately--yet similarly. Allies. Each had been confident that during the night _Uarnl_--had-- There was nothing else on the front sheets but the names _Ih_, _Lof_, _Dir_, and _Uarnl_ and the story of their possessors' escape from Mars Detain. A power breakdown had weakened the energy barrier that kept their elusive minds, and hence their bodies, in confinement. By the time armed replacements could be sent to the _Aarnians'_ isolated cell the beings had vanished. The guards had been strangled. Energy barriers had been set up at all space and canal ports. Other barriers had been formed into a hundred mile noose that was being carefully drawn in toward Detain. Joe folded the last paper over the cruel three-eyed faces that seemed to mock him. He fumbled at the visiphone. Miss Kal was wiping her lips cheerfully. "Miss Kal," Joe said, "get me Mr. Reader in Shipping." He leaned his elbows wearily on the desk and waited until Reader's puritanical face appeared on the screen. "Yeah, boss?" "Reader, has anyone consigned four large crates to go off-world tomorrow night?" "Yeah," Reader replied promptly; "Mr. Kent. B-type mobile spacesuits. Had me alter the manifest this morn--" "Do you have the crates down there?" "Uh-uh. Mr. Kent said he'd skim them in sometime tomorrow. He was coming up to get the switch O.K.'d by you. Why? Anything wrong?" Joe opened the center drawer of his desk. "No. Nothing's wrong. Listen carefully, Reader. I'm going to take care of those crates myself. If I'm--not in my office tomorrow you are _not_ to load them on-ship! No matter what Mr. Ke--_anyone_ says or does! If the crates come in refrigerate them and call the Patrol and send the name of the addressee to Detain immediately!"