Dowland took his police gun from the pocket of his hunting jacket, and began checking it by touch, as he swung the car's nose about toward the ranch and went slanting down toward the air. Either of the brothers might decide to make trouble, particularly if they had something to conceal--but, at any rate, they couldn't claim he hadn't been invited down. Picking up the girl in the scope again, he saw that she realized he was coming in. She had dropped the cloth but was still gazing up toward the car, her free hand shielding her eyes from the setting sun. In the next instant, without the slightest preliminary warning, every instrument in the panel before Dowland went dead. Then the grid-car began to drop like a stone. * * * * * The world-wide gravity grid was Terra's general power source. It had been an idiotically expensive installation; actually, no other planet could have afforded it at present. Once installed, it was drawn on for idiotically minor services. There weren't enough human beings on Terra to begin to make a significant use of the grid. But, there were compensating features. The grid was esthetically unobtrusive, and available everywhere. It supplied power for anything from personal wrist watches on up through the giant docking machines at the space-ports. And it was reliable. There had been no power failures and no accidents connected with the grid recorded in its eighty years of operation. That shining safety record, Dowland thought, manipulating the flight controls with desperate haste, might become seriously marred in something like three-quarters of a minute now. He'd be lucky to get down alive. And another thought was clamoring for a different kind of action with almost equal urgency--unusual and unexplained physical phenomena of any kind were one of the things the YM searchers were alerted to look out for; and he'd certainly run into one of them here. He shot a glance down to his camouflaged wrist communicator. Just a few seconds to spare, and he could get a private-beam alarm in to the Solar Police Authority representative at the Columbia spaceport. He didn't have a few seconds to spare. The grid-car was a lousy glider--ponderous, sickeningly slow to respond. The rim of the mesa swayed up. If he missed that stretch of cleared ground around the Trelawney ranch, the car would either tear itself to pieces in the forest beyond or do a ditch into the piled rubble at the mesa's foot. He hauled back on the controls again, felt the car actually begin to rise for an instant-- * * * * * "I'm sorry," Jill Trelawney was crying, running up the slope toward him. "I'm so terribly sorry. I tired to warn you. I simply didn't realize--are you hurt?"