in color since his arrival.

The village was hidden from view by the outer trees but there should
have been some activity in the broad area visible to him. There was
none, not even along the distant segment of what should have been a busy
road. The natives were up to something and he knew, from hard experience
on other alien worlds, that it would be nothing good. It would be
another misunderstanding of some kind and he didn't know enough of their
incomprehensible language to ask them what it was--

* * * * *

Suddenly, as it always came, he felt someone or something standing close
behind him and peering over his shoulder. He dropped his hand to the
blaster he had taken to wearing at all times and whirled.

Nothing was behind him. There never was. The control room was empty,
with no hiding place for anything, and the door was closed, locked by
the remote-control button beside him. There was nothing.

The sensation of being watched faded, as though the watcher had
withdrawn to a greater distance. It was perhaps the hundredth time
within six days that he had felt the sensation. And when he slept at
night something came to nuzzle at his mind; faceless, formless, utterly
alien. For the past three nights he had not let the blaster get beyond
quick reach of his hand, even when in bed.

But whatever it was, it could not be on the ship. He had searched the
ship twice, a methodical compartment-by-compartment search that had
found nothing. It had to be the work of the natives from outside the
ship. Except....

Why, if the natives were telepathic, did the one called Throon go
through the weary pretense of trying to learn a mutually understandable
form of communication?

There was one other explanation, which he could not accept: that he was
following in the footsteps of Will Garret of Ship Nine who had
deliberately gone into a white sun two months after the death of his
twin brother.

He looked at the chair beside his own, Johnny's chair, which would
forever be empty, and his thoughts went back down the old, bitter paths.
The Exploration Board had been wrong when they thought the close bond
between identical twins would make them the ideal two-man crews for the
lonely, lifetime journeys of the Exploration Ships. Identical twins were
too close; when one of them died, the other died in part with him.

They had crossed a thousand light-years of space together, he and
Johnny, when they came to