Ed had been feeling this himself--almost with panic, because he was enough the person he had been to ache inside with the importance and tension of what happened at home. Yet somehow part of him was drifting away on its own special course. "Hold on, Babs, a little longer," he urged. They fell into torpid sleep after they had devised a mechanism to arouse them with an electric shock at an appointed time. It conserved their strength and allowed them to pass the long interval quickly. Ed Dukas's slumber was not altogether dreamless. Like shadows, people moved in his mind. His parents. His old friend Les Payten, who perhaps had shown the white feather and had been lost to a small viewpoint. Schaeffer, one of the greatest scientists, barricaded in his underground lab in the City. And Harwell, the efficient but daring adventurer--another legend of his boyhood, who sometime was supposed to command the first star ship. And perhaps most of all, there was that fantastic android bigot, Carter Loman, who aroused his black fury. Perhaps Ed slept lighter than the others and awoke more quickly to the tingling prickle of electricity, because he had to run the show. The major burden of responsibility was his. He shook his wife and his uncle awake and pointed to the blue-green bead that was the Earth, still several million miles away. Lashing their equipment to their shoulders and tying onto one another's waists like Alpine climbers, they leapt back into space one more, pushed by the neutron thrust of their Midas Touch cylinders. They had to make the rest of their trip apart from their meteor, which would not pass any nearer to Earth. When the home planet was expanded by nearness to a great, mottled, fuzzy bubble, Ed tugged at the line for attention and spoke without sound in the stinging silence: "We've talked everything over before," he said. "So we know generally what to do--though only generally. We'd like to stick together. But there is just no way to do that and work fast--which may be a vital point. So we'll soon have to scatter. But we'll listen on our receivers. At least one of us should be able to find a way to communicate back. Failing that, we still know where to meet. Remember--the oak by my old house. The valley made by the trunk and the lowest branch." Prell's brows knitted, his mind probably steeped in the swift, strange action to come. Barbara gave a soundless laugh. "The crotch of an oak!" her lips commented. "What a trysting place! But it seems natural enough. Are we mad, or were we once just dull?" Was her gaiety just bravado, or was she as cool as she seemed? Ed hoped that she was cool. Tugging at the linten line that joined them, Ed drew himself close to her. "You don't have to speak, Eddie," she told him. "I know what you're thinking. But why shouldn't I--and all of us--be all right?"