Paul Grayson landed his ship on the concrete apron and donned space attire for his walk across the airless planet to the Station. He came from his ship--and though he had seen it countless times before--Paul paused to view the beauty of the airless midnight sky. He looked for Sol, hidden in the starry curtain. He looked at Proxima, a tiny star but utterly brilliant at this distance. It blinded him; luckily the beautiful binary of Alpha Centauri was behind the little planet and he was saved the hurt of looking at that brilliance. With the same thrill of anticipation he had enjoyed for day upon day now, Paul turned from his ship and started to walk toward the Station. What he might learn there would change the thinking of the galaxy. It was the culmination of years of thought and experimentation; it was the crux of the matter, the final evidence that would give Paul the weight and the conviction. From here he could go on and up; here, now, at any rate soon, was the incontrovertible truth. He checked his gear thoroughly, but it was force of habit caused by the desire of his own safety. He had planned well. He had forgotten nothing. He chuckled happily. He had forgotten nothing. The lissome sweetness of Nora Phillips and the promise of complete fulfillment was sweet recollection. When Paul returned to Terra he would have the world on the palm of his hand--to hold tightly and give to Nora. His eye caught a bit of glitter in the dust of Proxima I and he stooped to pick it up because Nora might like a crystal from a far planet. He did not hear the passage of bullets over his bent back because Proxima I possessed no air to carry their sound. He could not hear the cursing of the man in the spacecraft hidden ten miles across the dusty plain, nor could he see the frantic effort to readjust the sighting mechanism of the machine rifle. Five thousand feet per second was the muzzle velocity of the rifle in space and because there was no impeding air, the bullets had taken two seconds to travel from gun to target position. In those two seconds Paul bent over, causing the burst of fire to miss. There was no second fullisade. The enemy had had too little time to readjust his sights. The enemy had also been overconfident, so had not prepared for a miss. * * * * * The radio was silent. Only the crackle of cosmic static came from the speaker to show that it was alive. The Z-wave was even more silent for there was no interfering cosmic energies to make Z-wave static. Paul set up the test equipment and checked both. They were obviously 'hot' and awaiting the arrival of some signal in order to burst into full-throated life.