Then he unbuckled himself, went to the airlock controls and opened the boat. His eardrums popped as pressures equalized; he stepped out into a still, cold air, under a deep violet sky and a shrunken sun. The low gravity made it wholly dreamlike. Unthinkingly, the three humans moved close together. They looked down kilometers of glass-slick blackness. A spaceship was landing far off; machines rolled up to attend it, but otherwise there was no sign of life. Yet the emptiness did not suggest decay. Holbrook thought again of the bustle around a Terrestrial airport. It seemed grubby beside this immense quietude. The spacefield reached almost to the near horizon. At one end clustered several towers. They must be two kilometers high, thought Holbrook in the depths of an overwhelmed brain: half a dozen titanic leaps of metal, but blended into a harmony which caught at his heart. "There!" He turned around. The Zolotoyans were approaching. * * * * * There were ten of them, riding on two small platforms: the propulsive system was not clear, and Holbrook's engineer's mind speculated about magnetic-field drives. They stood up, so rigid that not until the flying things had grounded and the creatures disembarked could the humans be quite sure they were alive. There was about them the same chill beauty as their city bore. Two and a half meters tall they stood, and half of it was lean narrow-footed legs. Their chests and shoulders tapered smoothly, the arms were almost cylindrical but ended in eerily manlike hands. Above slender necks poised smooth, mask-faced heads--a single slit nostril, delicately lipped mouths immobile above narrow chins, fluted ears, long amber eyes with horizontal pupils. Their skins were a dusky hairless purple. They were clad identically, in form-fitting black; they carried vaguely rifle-like tubes, the blast-guns Holbrook remembered. He thought between thunders: _Why? Why should they ignore us for months, and then attack us so savagely when we dared to look at them, and then fail to pursue us or even search for our camp?_ _What are they going to do now?_ Grushenko stepped forward. "Comrades," he said, holding up his hands. His voice came as if from far away; the bare black spaces ate it down, and Holbrook saw how a harshly suppressed fear glistened on the Ukrainian's skin. But Grushenko pointed to himself. "Man," he said. He pointed to the sky. "From the stars." One of the Zolotoyans trilled a few notes. But it was at the others he (?) looked. A gun prodded Holbrook's back. Ekaterina said with a stiff smile: "They are not in a conversational mood, Ilya Feodorovitch. Or perhaps only the commissar of interstellar relations is allowed to speak with us."