Only they weren't hurrying, he noticed after a moment. One man was halfway down the house steps across the street, a brief case under his arm. But he wasn't moving. He was frozen in mid-air, off-balance, one foot halfway down to the next step. A housewife had stopped in mid-stride two doors down, her shopping bag swung forward at an awkward angle. At the corner, a small Renault car was poised in the middle of the street, caught in the process of turning. Further down the block, two small boys in short pants and berets had been playing catch. One was crouched, his hand out. The other was standing, one foot in the air and one upraised arm behind his head. Stan narrowed his eyes and located the ball. It was about ten feet from the thrower, crawling slowly through the air. Even as he watched, the ball slowed and stopped, hovering twenty feet above the asphalt. "The air!" Reynolds suddenly screamed. "It's getting hard to breathe!" "It'll get harder!" Tanner said grimly. "This will last for about half an hour. Slow your breathing and whatever you do, move slow. You move too fast and the air friction alone will set your clothes on fire!" He swung slowly forward and brought the butt of his heat gun against the glass. Small cracks lanced through the window but it didn't break. Tanner pushed against it and the pieces slowly folded outwards. "We're in the fast field, Martin--and so are they." "They?" "Avis and her men. The ones who caught you flat-footed under the ramp the other day. They're the ones who put up the field, who killed Clark." Clark. Avis, Stan thought, could probably speed things up as well as slow them down. Clark was to have stayed home today, to wait for them. Avis and her men had waited until everybody but Clark had left, then they had turned on the field and aged the house and Clark by a hundred years in five minutes. It explained the skeleton, it explained the dust, it explained the crumbling cellophane and the yellowed curtains that powdered at the touch. And the day on the ramp in Chicago. Avis had speeded things up, then. What had seemed to him to take half an hour, had actually occurred in minutes. "How come we're not standing still like the others?" "Neutralizers--they're built into your belt. If they weren't, you could have died a long time ago. Our own fields shield Reynolds." He broke off. "_Here they come!_" * * * * * Across the street, a figure darted from one parked car to another. A man suddenly ran behind the car that was poised on the corner. Stan could make out other figures moving behind the windows across the street. There was the familiar spanging sound and a series of holes stitched themselves in the fragments of glass left in the window frame, three inches from his cheek. There was an impression of speed and heat and a crackling sound as the tiny projectiles thudded into the plaster behind him.