mless too, I suppose!"

He stood with his hands on his hips, dropped his head and took a long,
deep breath. When he looked up again his forehead was furrowed into an
intense frown. "Gentlemen ... as I call you from force of habit ...
we've been finding dead cities of the Outsiders for centuries. They were
all over God knows how many galaxies before your ancestors or mine had
stopped playing with their tails; as far as we can tell they had a
civilization as tightly-knit as our own, and probably stronger. And
sometime about forty thousand years ago they started pulling out. They
left absolutely nothing behind but empty buildings and a few crumbling
bits of machinery. And we've been following those remains ever since we
got out of our own star-system.

"Well, we just may have found them at last. Right here, on Hirlaj. Now
what do you think of that?"

No one said anything for a minute. Rynason looked down at Mara, caught
her smile, and stood up.

"I don't think the Hirlaji are the Outsiders," he said calmly.

Manning shot a sharp glance at him. "You saw the photos."

"Yes, I saw them. That's Outsiders work, all right, or something a lot
like it. But it doesn't necessarily prove that these ... how many of
them are there? Twenty-five? I don't think these creatures are the
Outsiders. We've traced their history back practically to the point of
complete barbarism. Their culture was never once high enough to get them
off this planet, let alone to let them spread all over among the stars."

Manning waited for him to finish, then he turned back to the rest of the
men in the room and spread his hands. "Now that, gentlemen, just shows
how much we've found out so far." He looked over at Rynason again. "Has
it occurred to you, Lee, that if these horses _are_ the Outsiders, that
maybe they know a little more than we do? I suppose you're going to say
you had a telepathic hookup with one of them and you didn't see a thing
to make you suspicious ... but just remember that they've been using
telepathy for several thousand years and that you hardly know what
you're doing when you try it.

"Look, I don't trust them--if they're the Outsiders they've got maybe a
hundred thousand years head-start on us scientifically. There may be
only a couple dozen of them, but we don't know how strong they are."

"That's if they're really the Outsiders," said Rynason.

Manning nodded his head impatiently. "Yes, that's what I'm saying. If
they're th