But even above the noise of his own rotorjets, the stridence of descending freighters erupted in a pandemonium of sound all around him. Great clouds of rockets, clustered in fleets, were darkening the sky and raining down onto the surface. He barely managed to pull out from under one of the formations before it could pinch him against the ground. Swearing in oaths that he had not used in years, he headed for the nearest group of ships. Before he could close in, they had discharged their cargoes and thundered off into space again. He altered course for another detachment of freighters, only to meet with the same frustrating results. By the time he had aimed his craft at a third group, all the ships had blasted away, leaving everywhere great, gleaming mounds and stacks and irregular rows of crates and containers that completely obscured the surface. Enraged, Titus gunned the craft for home. He picked his way between several monstrous peaks of grain, some of them soaring nearly all the way up through the six-hundred-foot-thick atmosphere, and threw on his brakes to avoid collision with a tremendous pyramid of what looked like corn kernels. With stark apprehension, he envisioned his world shaking apart under the eccentric forces. But he quelled his fears with logic: This new addition of mass, apparently distributed evenly over all but the four square miles that had already served as a dumping ground, would be unbalanced only to a negligible degree. * * * * * Titus flicked on his landing lights as he headed into the night. But from over the horizon came a glare considerably stronger than the candlepower of his own electrical system. As he pulled up to the mooring pylon, the explanation was evident. Scores of Pullman crafts were packed so tightly around his house that the blunt noses of several were sticking out over the veranda. He cut off the idling jets. The militant strains of a Venurian march, blaring from the instruments of a hundred-piece symphony, swelled up mightily all around him. The orchestra itself was wedged between two residential crafts while the roof of McWorther's generating house served as the conductor's podium. On the veranda, a full troupe of Simalean Ballet dancers swirled and caracoled, not seeming to mind that they were occasionally overflowing the tiles and flouncing not so lightly through Edna's caladiums. His wife stood helplessly by, still gripping the autobroom which she had evidently wielded without success in an attempt to rout the intruders. Dismayed, Titus elbowed his way through a dedicated choral group that was patriotically rendering the "Fayothian Anthem," sidestepped a tumbling foursome obviously from one of the Lesser Javapa planets and pushed aside a debating team which was having little luck making itself heard above the general cacophony. Edna swept out to meet him. "Titus, they just won't leave!" "Who are they? What do they want?"