you just heard about, aren't you? You know what's right and you know what's wrong, even though you've only been in this time, this universe, for a few hours!'
Kieran looked at her closely. He thought he was beginning to get a glimmer of the shape of things now.
'You—all you who woke me up illegally—you belong to this Humanity Party, don't you? You did it for some reason connected with that?'
'Yes,' she answered defiantly. 'We need a symbol in this political struggle. We thought that one of the oldtime space pioneers, one of the humans who began the conquest of the stars, would be it. We—'
Kieran interrupted. 'I think I get it. It was really considerate of you. You drag a man back from what amounts to death, for a party rally. 'Oldtime space hero condemns non-humans'—it would go something like that, wouldn't it?'
'Listen—,' she began.
'Listen, hell,' he said. He was hot with rage, shaking with it. 'I am glad to say that you could not possibly have picked a worse symbol than me. I have no more use for the idea of the innate sacred superiority of one species over another than I had for that of one kind of man over another.'
Her face changed. From an angry woman, she suddenly became a professional psychologist, coolly observing reactions.
'It's not the political question you really resent,' she said. 'You've wakened to a strange world and you're afraid of it, in spite of all the pre-awakening preparation we gave your subconscious. You're afraid, and so you're angry.'
Kieran got a grip on himself. He shrugged. 'What you say may be true. But it doesn't change the way I feel. I will not help you one damned bit.'
Webber got up from his seat and came back toward them, his tall form stooping. He looked at Kieran and then at the woman.
'We have to settle this right now,' he said. 'We're getting near enough to Sako to go out of drive. Are we going to land or aren't we?'
'Yes,' said Paula steadily. 'We're landing.'
Webber glanced again at Kieran's face. 'But if that's the way he feels—'
'Go ahead and land,' she said.
5.
It was nothing like landing in a rocket. First there was the business referred to as 'going out of drive'. Paula made Kieran strap in and she said, 'You may find this unpleasant, but just sit tight. It doesn't last long.' Kieran sat stiff and glowering, prepared for anything and determined not to show it no matter how he felt. Then Webber did something to the control board and the universe fell apart. Kieran's stomach came up and stuck in his throat. He was falling—up? Down? Sideways? He didn't know, but whichever it was not all the parts of him were falling at the same rate, or perhaps it was not all in the same direction, he didn't know that either, but it was an exceptionally hideous feeling. He opened his mouth to protest, and all of a sudden he was sitting normally in the chair in the normal cabin and screaming at the top of his lungs.
He shut up.
Paula said, 'I told you it would be unpleasant.'
'So you did,' said Kieran. He sat, sweating. His hands and feet were cold.
Now for the first time he became aware of motion. The flitter seemed to hurtle forward at comet-like speed. Kieran knew that this was merely an ironic little joke, because now they were proceeding at something in the range of normal velocity, whereas before their speed had been quite beyond his comprehension. But he could comprehend this. He could feel it. They were going like a bat out of hell, and somewhere ahead of them was a planet, and he was closed in, blind, a mouse in a nose-cone. His insides writhed with helplessness and the imminence of a crash. He wanted very much to start screaming again, but Paula was watching him.
In a few moments that desire became academic. A whistling shriek began faintly outside the hull and built swiftly to a point where nothing could have been heard above it. Atmosphere. And somewhere under the blind wall of the flitter a rock-hard world-face reeling and rushing, leaping to meet them—
The flitter slowed. It seemed to hang motionless, quivering faintly. Then it dropped. Express elevator in the world's tallest building, top to bottom—only the elevator is a bubble and the wind is tossing it from side to side as it drops and there is no bottom.
They hung again, bounding lightly on the unseen wind.
Then down.
And hang again.
And down.
Paula said suddenly, 'Webber. Webber, I think he's dying.' She began to unstrap.
Kieran said faintly, 'Am I turning green?'
She looked at him, frowning. 'Yes.'
'A simple old malady. I'm seasick. Tell Webber to quit playing humming-bird and put this thing down.'
Paula made an impatient gesture and tightened her belt again.
Hang and drop. Once more, twice more. A little rocking bounce, a light thump, motion ceased. Webber turned a series of switches. Silence.
Kieran said, 'Air?'
Webber opened a hatch in the side of the cabin. Light poured in. It had to be sunlight, Kieran knew, but it was a queer color, a sort of tawny orange that carried a pleasantly burning heat. He got loose with Paula helping him and tottered to the hatch. The air smelled of clean sun-warmed dust and some kind of vegetation. Kieran climbed out of the flitter, practically throwing himself out in his haste. He wanted solid ground under him, he didn't care whose or where.
And as his boots thumped onto the red-ochre sand, it occurred to him that it had been a very long time since he had had solid ground underfoot. A very long time indeed—
His insides knotted up again, and this time it was not seasickness but fear, and he was cold all through again in spite of the hot new sun.
He was afraid, not of the present, nor of the future, but of the past. He was afraid of the thing tagged Reed Kieran, the stiff blind voiceless thing wheeling its slow orbit around the Moon, companion to dead worlds and dead space, brother to the cold and the dark.
He began to tremble.
Paula shook him. She was talking but he couldn't hear her. He could only hear the rush of eternal darkness past his ears, the thin squeak of his shadow brushing across the stars. Webber's face was somewhere above him, looking angry and disgusted. He was talking to Paula, shaking his head. They were far away. Kieran was losing them, drifting away from them on the black tide. Then suddenly there was something like an explosion, a crimson flare across the black, a burst of heat against the cold. Shocked and wild, the physical part of him clawed back to reality.
Something hurt him, something threatened him. He put his hand to his cheek and it came away red.
Paula and Webber were yanking at him, trying to get him to move.
A stone whizzed past his head. It struck the side of the flitter with a sharp clack, and fell. Kieran's nervous relays finally connected. He jumped for the open hatch. Automatically he pushed Paula ahead of him, trying to shield her, and she gave him an odd startled look. Webber was already inside. More stones rattled around and one grazed Kieran's thigh. It hurt. His cheek was bleeding freely. He rolled inside the flitter and turned to look back out the hatch. He was mad.
'Who's doing it?' he demanded.
Paula pointed. At first Kieran was distracted by the strangeness of the landscape. The flitter crouched in a vastness of red-ochre sand laced with some low-growing plant that shone like metallic gold in the sunlight. The sand receded in tilted planes lifting gradually to a range of mountains on the right, and dropping gradually to infinity on the left. Directly in front of the flitter and quite literally a stone's throw away was the beginning of a thick belt of
