"A mad dog," the astrophysicist added. "The kids did it. They can make any living thing appear anywhere they please." "A trick!" Greg said. The whisper of logic had been right. He glanced at where the boy had fallen; the child was gone. "They're trying to make me leave," Vayle complained, "before I finished my research. They know I have the answer to--" "Now you have no other choice," Greg snapped. He pulled the scientist toward his ship; the woman followed. Greg reasoned that he might still have an outside chance. The children obviously had expected him to take Vayle back to the hotel. That would have given them a chance to disable his ship. Greg pushed the two through the airlock. His luck still held. He shoved them toward the safety webbing and jerked down the firing toggle. As the ship quivered in the thunder of the power tubes, Greg dialed the satellite course on the pilot computer. It was the simplest setting he could make. His was an old ship, built when the satellite had still been used as an initial landing station, before the new fuel had made the big wheel obsolete. Every ship had once had an automatic satellite course projection taped in the pilot computer. Without a new setting, the ship would move into the core ramp of the wheel and the lock would open automatically when the magnetic seal was completed. Greg felt the sudden, crushing weight of gravity. He caught at the safety webbing until the pressure stabilized. From that point--if he remembered his early flights accurately--it would be six minutes before the ship reached the satellite. He had won. Nothing could stop him--nothing. Then Holly Wilson screamed and Greg saw the twelve year old boy standing beside the flight console. "It wasn't a virus invasion," the child said, shouting to be heard above the roar of the power tubes. "I didn't know you were thinking that this morning. I could have explained if--" Greg swung his fist--against an emptiness. The boy rematerialized two feet away. "Reset your course!" the boy cried. "You understand machines, Captain; we don't. And I can't get enough technical information from your mind to do it for you." "One two, buckle my shoe!" Greg thought, in an ecstacy of triumph. He had kept that much of his thinking safe. The kids were making one last effort to save themselves--he was sure of that--but it wouldn't work. They had the alien skill to pry into a human mind, but they were helpless against man's machines. Inexorably the computer would drive the ship to the satellite; nothing could stop it. "Think rationally," the boy pleaded, "not with your emotions. You have only four minutes left, Captain Greg. If the Redearth was a virus invasion as you believe it was, why were only the children affected? We made it an antibiotic; we used it for millions of people; every colonist was innoculated before he emigrated."