For a long while he merely lay there trying to wash his mind of the horror. But the steady whine of the subspace drive reminded him that the _Photon_ was streaking in the direction of the Hyades. That it would end its headlong plunge in the Aldebaran system, only halfway there, brought no relief from his baseless, unreasonable fear. When he returned to the control compartment, the ship was back in normal space and within Aldebaran Four-B's gravitational field. He joined Carol Cummings in the forward section, hooking his arm through a view-port strap and mooring himself against null gravity. "You suppose we're home free?" she asked uncertainly. Her normally effusive smile, he noticed, had moderated considerably. "If McAllister doesn't louse up his landing." "I take it he's not very efficient." "Pure and simple understatement. Last time out he missed an entire continent. It was a case for Search and Rescue." Carol pressed forward and soft light from Aldebaran Four, off the port bow, warmed her sculpturesque features with primrose high lights. "I should imagine he would have been cashiered." "But he wasn't. Instead he turns up on this _crucial_ mission." He busied himself with frequency adjustment on his portable transmitter. With it he would be able to tell, soon after landing, whether the Operations Co-ordinator could still be reached orally through its command discriminator circuit. He flicked on the power switch, positioned the microphone comfortably against his larynx and sharply intoned a series of numerals. An oscilloscope faithfully traced the amplitude pattern, verifying effective transmission. * * * * * Down the companionway in the pilot's compartment, he could see McAllister anchored in his acceleration couch. He was drifting back and forth between padding and slack restraining straps, vicariously lost in the blood-and-guts action of a dramatape feeding into the view slot of his helmet. Stewart read the label on the empty container--"The Kowalski Bros. in the Korean War." "Always has his head buried in one of those escapist tapes, hasn't he?" Carol observed, still staring out the port. "I don't think he ever grew up," Stewart agreed. But, again, even the Bureau seemed to contain its share of coasters who had never quite reached maturity, he remembered. "Even in the Bureau," Carol observed thoughtfully, "you'll find coasters who've never reached maturity." Intuitively, he tensed. Was it just coincidence that she had repeated, almost word for word, his own thoughts? "I've never looked at any of those warfare tapes myself," she said. "But I've heard about them. Do you suppose armed conflict was really that horrible?" "Pretty rough, according to the historians. It's not the sort of thing I'd like to be mixed up in." "And McAllister?"