He considered wielding his blaster but rejected that expedient as an excessive and unnecessary ostentation. Instead he countered by raising his extensible vise. The lesser show of strength sufficed to discourage Minnie's ambition, for the moment at least. How foolish she was to imagine she could supplant Him as the Supreme Being! Let her try. Even if she succeeded, he would merely deny her a place at the trough next feeding period. _Then_ where would she get the vital charge for her batteries? II The _Photon II_ groaned, heaved and popped out of subspace for a fix before striking out on the last, short leg of its journey. As Stewart had feared, they were five light-years off course. Ship Systems Officer Mortimer's thickly-fleshed face struggled with an embarrassing smile. "Well, you can't hit 'em on the nose _every_ time out," he rationalized, waddling back to the charts. Stewart reflected that rare indeed were the occasions on which Mortimer came anywhere near the nasal target. Conceding the loss of nearly an entire day, he waited for Director Randall's permissive nod, then joined Mortimer in cutting the new navigation tapes. It took two hours to process all data and feed them into the SCC-772. When the computer burped out the new heading, Stewart threaded the tape into the control programmer and decided to spend the uneventful period of subspace travel in his bunk. Sleep came swiftly, but it was shallow and restless. More than once over the next several hours, as he plummeted down a chasm of nightmares, he regretted having left the control compartment. First his dreams brought him back to the Hyadean Cluster, as they had on so many occasions during recent weeks. And, for a while, he drank in the blue-green beauty of the seven--or, was it eight?--worlds that seemed to beckon with all their irresistible allure. They were incredibly splendrous, these planets that would soon embrace man and feed and clothe and shelter him. But, as he admired them in his dream, a sort of astronomical surrealism bunched them together--all in orbit around a central, massive sun--until it seemed they were occupying so compact an area that they must surely crumble under the weight of their mutual attraction. And, as though upon his suggestion, crumble they did. Only, it was no pulverizing force that scattered them into fragmented rings, such as those around Sol's Saturn. Instead, each planet cracked like a hatching egg, its crust stripping away and exposing beneath a gruesome Harpy that was all razor-sharp talons and vicious beak and slime-filmed, ruffled feathers. Stewart tried to scream himself awake but couldn't. He only flailed helplessly in the void while monstrous wings thrashed space into a frenzy, producing great currents that set the stars themselves to eddying and swirling. They dived at him, but before their talons could sink into his flesh he awoke trembling and cold in his twisted, moist clothes.