And in the corner of his eye he saw the blue-white flash erupt dead-center below. He eased the button pressure and hovered, out of range. In a moment Gundar Tayne's craft would be in the air. Then.... "Kids--kids, you O.K.?" He locked the ship in its hover and then he was beside them, scanning their half-naked, bruised bodies in quick glances, then holding them to him with all the strength of both arms. "Dad?" "Yes. Me, your old man...." "We been dodgin' and watchin' for hours, Dad. Let's get out of here!" He held them to him a second longer, then turned to the communications panel, Mike at his left, Terry at his right. "... They almost caught us at the door down there.... Dad I--I think I killed one...." "We did as you said, Dad. We watched as much as we could, but most of the time we had to stay on the ground, playing dead...." The communications dial was still at _FIELD ADDRESS_. He looked at it, then looked at the viewscreen. Thousands of them, stilled for so short a moment, now surging, tearing at each other's vitals again. There was a terrible hurt somewhere deep inside him, and he wanted to voice it, to get it out, to tell them somehow. But they would not understand him if he were to speak for a minute or for an hour. These whom he watched had been lost from the day of their birth. But, thank Heaven, not the two at his side. "Get in those hammocks, kids," he said. They did, and he braced himself against the bulkhead. He was twisting the top button even as he punched it home, and it caught. The deck rushed up with smashing force. CHAPTER XVIII The white, sterile room seemed to have closed in upon itself since she had been first brought to it so many hours before, and the heavy desk was now just a great mass of steel, its curved lines no longer distinct, but trailing off somewhere in an incomprehensible geometry of their own. There was movement behind the desk, white, blurry movement that blended with the walls, but the flesh-colored mask that hovered above it did not seem to move at all. Dot's eyes could no longer focus for the fatigue of the tests had sucked the well of her physical energy dry, but she knew the face. He was Mannix, director of the S-Council, they had told her. The tests had torn her soul from her, turned it inside out, stripped it naked, examined it beneath their microscopes of unending questions asked in a thousand different ways with a thousand different inflections, connotations.... The sterile white rooms, the lights, the darkness.... To hear what she and they had known from the beginning, and what the blurred, unmoving face was telling her now.