Saxon glanced toward the east, recognized the graying darkness that heralded the dawn. He said, "Alpha Centauri A's rising. Maybe we can see where we are." The light was quickening fast with dawn. Saxon climbed to the crest of a ridge, stared off into the southwest. All at once his heart stood still. He called, "Ileth! Ileth! Come up here!" The girl ran up the ridge, the urgency in his voice dispelling her weariness. "What is it, Jon?" He pointed ahead. "Aren't those the hills south of the ship?" She narrowed her eyes, studying the blue outlines in the dawn light. "Yes. But, Jon, where is the ship?" He pointed at a blackened circle in the grass not an eighth of a kilometer distant. The circle was almost a thousand yards in diameter. "That's where our jets burned the grass when we landed. That's where the _Shooting Star_ was yesterday!" In ten minutes they were tramping back and forth across the blackened circle of grass, kicking up little puffs of ashes. The mark of the jets were there, pressed deep in the soft soil. But those and the charred vegetation were the only signs that a ship had ever rested there. Ileth flung herself dejectedly to the grass at the edge of the circle. "I'm so hungry and bone weary and thirsty and disappointed, I could cry." Saxon sat down beside her. "I don't understand it," he said for the hundredth time. "I don't understand any of it." All at once, his scalp began to prickle its warning and Saxon recognized the alien feel. At the same instant Ileth screamed, leaping to her feet. Saxon felt his mouth go dry, his stomach contract as he stumbled erect beside her. Not ten yards distant, in the path of the rising sun, a naked man was materializing before their eyes. Saxon could see the grass and the hills and a segment of Alpha Centauri A through the man's body. A thought struck into Saxon's mind. "_So there you are._" It emanated from the Alien. "_We were afraid you might have gotten clean away._" Saxon realized the man was quite solid now, standing with bare feet planted in the pale green grass. There was an instrument like a watch strapped to his wrist. He was holding a small shiny cylinder. Saxon caught an echo of Ileth's thought. "_Oh Lord, he's naked as a grape!_" The man leveled the cylinder. There was a brief flash. Saxon felt an instant's giddiness, a rapid dissolution, then nothing. VIII Jon Saxon couldn't have been unconscious but a fraction of a second because he didn't have time to fall. He came to himself swaying dizzily, nauseated as if with space sickness. He opened his eyes. He was blind! The shock left him numb. Then gradually, like a flower unfolding its petals to the light, he felt his extra-human sixth sense assume control.