ransport in trouble? There were two trans-polar
routes that passed within a few hundred miles of here, but no air
transport he had ever seen had made a noise like that. Normally, they were
so high as to be both invisible and inaudible. Must be trouble of some
sort.

He reached down to the saddle pack without taking his eyes off the moving
speck and took out the radiophone. He held it to his ear and thumbed the
call button insistently.

_Grandfather_, he thought with growing irritation as the seconds passed,
_wake up! Come on, old dozer, rouse yourself from your dreams!_

At the same time, he checked his wrist compass and estimated the direction
of flight of the dot and its direction from him. He'd at least be able to
give the airline authorities some information if the ship fell. He wished
there were some way to triangulate its height and so on, but he had no
need for that kind of thing, so he hadn't the equipment.

"Yes? Yes?" came a testy, dry voice through the earphone.

Quickly, Wang gave his grandfather all the information he had on the
flying thing. By now, the whine had become a shrill roar, and the thing in
the air had become a silver-pink fish shape.

"I think it's coming down very close to here," Wang concluded. "You call
the authorities and let them know that one of the aircraft is in trouble.
I'll see if I can be of any help here. I'll call you back later."

"As you say," the old man said hurriedly. He cut off.

* * * * *

Wang was beginning to realize that the thing was a spaceship, not an
airship. By this time, he could see the thing more clearly. He had never
actually seen a spacecraft, but he'd seen enough of them on television to
know what they looked like. This one didn't look like a standard type at
all, and it didn't behave like one, but it looked even less like an
airship, and he knew enough to know that he didn't necessarily know every
type of spaceship ever built.

In shape, it resembled the old rocket-propelled jobs that had been first
used for space exploration a century before, rather than looking like the
fat ovoids that he was used to. But there were no signs of rocket
exhausts, and yet the ship was very obviously slowing, so it must have an
inertia drive.

It was coming in much lower now, on a line north of him, headed almost due
east. He urged the mare forward, in order to try to keep up with the
craft, although it was obviously going several hundr