They felt the landing. Then there was silence. They waited for Vannevan to come, but he did not. Instead, armed Irrian guards came and marched them out of the ship onto a blackened concrete apron. They stood there for a few minutes, in a chill wind. Birrel thought, shivering, "_Not Earth, this world I stand on. Not my own world--_" The diamond blaze of sunlight was wrong, the color of the sky was wrong, the too-light feeling of his body was strange. The silver ship behind them, the great gray city ahead, all wrong, queer-- "Remember your plan," whispered Kara. Birrel steadied. He had a part to play, and upon how he carried it through might depend their last slender chance. He played that part now. He gave a vivid imitation of a man who was in a panic. He looked up at the sun and cried out and shut his eyes, and then opened them again and looked wildly around him. Then, crying out in a voice edged with hysteria, he broke back toward the spaceship. The guards grabbed him and hauled him back. He told them shrilly, "I can't stay here, I won't stay--I want to go back--" The Irrian guards laughed at him. When a covered vehicle not unlike a light truck came speeding up, they shoved him and Kara and Thile into it and got in after them, still laughing. As the truck sped into the city, Birrel shivered, and looked at everything in a numb, scared way. * * * * * The city was as grim as it had looked from afar. The gray, utilitarian cement building-material used universally did not make for beauty. The men and women in the streets were mostly in a drab sort of coverall garment that was not beautiful either. Birrel saw them looking at the truck and guards as they passed, and he thought there was a sullenness in some of the watching faces. He remembered what Kara had said, that many of the Irrian people were discontented with their oligarchs' rule but were held down tightly. He thought they looked it. The truck turned finally into a courtyard and stopped. Heavy gates were locked behind it. Birrel and the others were ordered out. He managed to get close to Kara and give her hand a reassuring touch. Then they were taken inside a building made of greenish stone, instead of cement, with ominous-looking horizontal slits in the walls in place of windows. Inside, without a word of explanation, they were separated. Thile and Kara were marched away up a stairway while Birrel's guards took him on down a main hallway. The hall was painted a utilitarian gray and it had guards stationed at regular intervals. About halfway down there was a door with a double guard in front of it. Birrel's armed escort stopped him here, spoke to the guard, who spoke to someone inside by means of an intercom with a small video screen. Presently the door opened and Birrel was ushered inside.