Danton watched the altimeter, the power gauges, manipulated the power-tube stops. His body was an unfeeling, unconscious circuit of responses. Somehow he got the ship at vertical. The plate brought the landscape up to him, presented it to him like the unveiling work of a mad artist. Up-pushing violence of mountain walls, a valley, forest, dense alien looking stuff, thick and high and entangled and phosphorescent with a pinkish glow drifting like the reflection of a vast roaring furnace. And--a senseless glimpse of something archaic, too primitive to be real. Only a glimpse, so that immediately after, he decided he must have seen something else. A long trail of armored cars. Amtracs, it seemed, bristling with ancient types of guns. Armored cars. Amtracs. A few hundred years ago they had had them in Earth museums. The ship roared and shook. The scream of metal penetrated Danton's skull, became part of an iron ball grinding in his head.... No sentience possessed him now, no mind, no body, no hate or joy or hope or confused indecision about his twisted motivations. He thought simply, death possesses me. * * * * * But death was only nearby. Life was a power-tube, dimming to a dull yellow, flickering dangerously. Movement was without real substance. Shapes, voices vague and distant. He heard Van Ness and Keith talking once. Someone yelled. There was the burning sigh of the electronic rifles they had evidently been able to salvage. The light brightened slowly. He sat up. Keith and Van Ness stood beside him. Clothing torn, faces scratched and bleeding. Keith's mouth was tight, his jaw muscles rigid and pale. He turned, held his rifle steady. Van Ness wanted to know if Danton felt all right now, anything else wrong besides the knock on the head. Danton said he didn't know. "I thought it would be cold here." He was sweating. The air was muggy, quiet. The lake was huge before him, the mountains beyond it gigantic and blue-misted. The lake was glassy and still. Behind him was thick forest, reddish leaves, high trees, thickly entangled, odd flowers, shadows. A feeling of things alive--but of a cautious kind of living. Little eyes waiting and watching in the bushes, on the fringes. "Out of this valley, on the desert, it would be plenty cold," Keith said. Danton asked then, "What happened?" Keith watched the forest warily. "We hit the lake out there, had to swim in." "So now what?" Van Ness wanted to know. "We still have a kind of advantage," Danton said. "They don't know who we are, or where. They know nothing." "Neither do we," Keith said. "There's a chance Seers was wrong about the Oligarchs. Maybe their culture has changed. Maybe they don't intend to attack Earth." "Their ego couldn't stand to forget their defeat," Danton said. "They had a highly advanced technology that could conceivably control any environment, rather than the other way round. In some ways they were ahead of the rest of the world."