The two powder-burned and dirty spacemen who flanked the steel portals saluted him as he walked tiredly up the stone steps. "Who phoned me?" Wing asked. The redhead at the left of the portal saluted. "I did, Commander. Jack and I saw this thing and we peeked inside and saw that funny light, so we thought we'd better call you." Wing moved through the steel portals, stood in the quiet hush of the church. There, just before the altar rail was the curious blue light--like a hexagon of blue. He walked slowly toward it and as he approached, the altar behind it seemed to fade away and he was looking into a silver hallway. He halted within a foot of it. It was like looking through a doorway--why, it is a doorway, the doorway to the world these invaders came from! He unsheathed the revolver, spun the cylinder to see that it was loaded, and with only a glimpse over his shoulder at the two spacemen silhouetted in the church doorway, he stepped through. * * * * * It was like stepping through fire--a fire that clawed and tore at the heart of him--but it lasted only a moment. The hallway in which he found himself was of silver, tiny overlapping bits of silver plating that rippled and cast off flashes of light. He walked slowly ahead to the other doorway he saw before him. Framed in the door, he looked above him, through a glass roof, up into a strange star-studded night sky. Where is this world? Curt Wing wondered. Have I crossed a thousand, a million or a trillion light years to come here? He looked down from the night sky and the vastness of the transparent roof reached as far his eyes could see. It was only a whisper in his mind at first--then it grew stronger until it was as if his ears were hearing it. "You're a man," the thought said. Curt Wing's dark eyes cast about for the source of it. "You're a man," the emotionless thought repeated. "That is why we could not beat you. We are a dying race, trapped on a dying world. You are young and have your destiny still before you." "Who are you?" Wing's mind called out. "Where are you?" "We were never beaten until now. We knew that to survive this dying system we must fight across eternity to find another sun and another system. We started from mud and slime like you, and some day you too must come to this--the end of your destiny. "You will fight as we have fought. We built a machine to warp space. For centuries our scientists labored to perfect it, just as other technicians created a space scanner to find a world suitable to us." Curt Wing was trembling as he listened. Somehow, the measured cadence of those cold thoughts was fingering his heart, bringing a chill to it. "We found your world--the world of man, Earth, but we didn't know it until now. "We made a mistake--a mistake which is destroying us but will in your far distant future destroy you." "A mistake?" Wing's mind asked.