you a while ago. I was just playing a joke on you. I wasn't trying to
kill you._

She seemed to be thinking the statement over. _If you had tried again, I
would have let you. I didn't realize it was you at first._

He cursed himself.

_You were moving too fast a moment ago._

He was getting her position fixed. She lay west. He turned in that
direction. She broke the contact.

Search planes of the Air Force began to drone over the area; searching
for the saucer the radar had tracked to earth.

* * * * *

Walt walked for hours across the desert. His feet, unaccustomed to the
tight fitting shoes, pained him. He grew weary. Occasionally, lights
from the highway to his left winked by in the night. On he trudged. Sand
crept into his shoes.

Dawn came. He looked toward the mountains, blue with distance. He would
not be able to make them. Soon the sun would be overhead. The heat (it
was already promised) would be intense. He would have to have water. I
could change the sand to water--the air--the plants, he thought.
(Forential could, he told himself.) I could: If I only knew more; if I
only had practice. If I could only _see_ just how water is put together.
Forential should have explained things like that to us.

_Hello_, he thought to Julia.

He received no answer.

She's suspicious, he thought. What did I do to make her suspicious? She
wasn't when I first contacted her. But there was something funny about
her.... Maybe she knows I know she's a traitor. Forential said lie to
her.

_Hello_, he thought. _I'm a Lyrian traitor, too._

_Julia_, he thought. _Where are you?_

Damn her: she isn't going to answer.

He looked at the mountains. He was walking automatically now.

Forential has confidence in me, he thought. Or else he'd have given me
more instructions. He knows I can get there. It's up to me to do it,
that's all.... Well, I can't make the mountains by walking....

He crossed to the highway; he dreaded his first contact with earthlings.

It was a broad, gleaming band of concrete, six lanes wide with foot high
rails between lanes, broken, each mile, by changeover slots.

Early morning sun cut down from the east.

Cars came by like bullets. Whirrr, whish, and they were gone.

He waved at the ones going west, but they were past him almost before he
saw them. The trucks on the inner lanes were ladened streaks; the car
traffic on the middle one was varicolored blurs. A st