He waited for the pressure to ease. His temples were bursting, it was an agony to breathe, and he thought, It can't go on like this, it's got to let up! But it did not. There was a change in the pitch of the motor vibration. He listened to it climb, higher and higher, until it slipped over the threshhold of hearing, and as it climbed, the pressure grew. The bones of his chest crushed in upon his lungs. Everything around him began to waver and grow vague, to recede slowly into a reddish twilight. And still the pressure grew. Something was happening to him. Something unearthly and strange. He was a flier, a test-pilot. He had known pressure before. He had taken all the gravs a power-diving plane could bear and he had never come near blacking out. But this was different. He felt it in the fibres, the very atoms of his being. This was velocity beside which the velocities of the fastest jets was as nothing. This was the speed of interstellar flight. And he could feel it tearing at the separate cells of his flesh, riving them apart, rending the tissues of physical existence. _A difference, a condition of the flesh. With us there is no doubt, but you...._ Anguish became terror, terror turned into blind panic. His body was shredding apart, dissolving toward a tattered ruin, a heap of bloody rags. This body he had been so proud of, this star-born self that was only a mockery, a sham. The mutation hadn't bred true. He was going to die, to cease utterly from being. He was.... Far, far away, a voice, Shairn's voice, crying, "I've killed him. Poor Michael, I didn't mean for him to die!" Poor Michael. A mongrel, a walking deceit. Proud Michael, who thought he was so damned good, and wasn't anything. Idiot Michael, who had run after a witch. And she hadn't meant for him to die. She hadn't really been that angry because he had treated her like an equal--not nicely, perhaps, but like an equal, which he wasn't. That was kind of her, not really to want him killed. He began to be able to see her face again. He wasn't sure whether it was true sight, or only the memory of how she had looked before he began to die. But he could see her, pale, distorted. He was glad he could see her. She was sitting in front of him, and she wasn't far away. Somehow, pressure or no pressure, he was going to get to her. He was going to put his hands around her white throat, and then they could forget about starflight together, and it wouldn't matter that he was a mongrel and she was not. He began to fight against the pressure.