attack. Odin turned the receiver up
to its highest point, and speaking brokenly in the language of the Brons a
voice came through.

"Men of the strange ship. Men of the strange ship--"

"Yes," Odin answered.

"Good. You hear me. We are those who have been driven out of the city. We
would visit you in peace. We are called Lorens."

Within a few minutes, a dozen of the strangers had been brought aboard The
Nebula. Ato summoned Nea and the rest of the captains.

The leader of the visitors was a man by the name of Val. He was a tall,
lean man with a Norman nose and his dark skin was drawn so tightly about
his face that he looked a bit like a mummy. Val was over sixty, Odin
judged, and though his wrists were skinny the tendons and muscles on his
arms stood out like taut lengths of cable. He and his men were dressed
alike--a sleeveless shirt of walnut-brown plastic, dark peg-bottomed
trousers of corduroy, and footgear that looked like engineer's boots
with rippled soles. The tops of the boots were tight-fitting and the
peg-bottomed trousers were drawn snugly over them. Odin learned later
that what had appeared to be green moss out there on the weathered plain
was a kind of thistle with cat-claw thorns.

Each man wore a heavy black belt about his waist. Attached to the belt
were at least a dozen weapons: several grenades, a pistol, another
pistol with a flaring muzzle, a long knife, a glassy looking tube fitted
to a pistol-butt, and a blue-black ugly thing which was shaped like an
over-sized toadstool.

In addition to this odd assortment of gear, each man carried something
in his hand which greatly resembled the frame of an old-fashioned
umbrella--except that half a dozen vari-colored buttons were set into
the handles.

"It was nearly thirty years ago," Val was explaining, "that the voice of
Grim Hagen began to interfere with our broadcasting system. Some said it
was a god. Some said it was a devil. It came from space. It came from
almost anywhere. We have been an intelligent race, but we were sore beset.
Our sun was dying. All that we had was our sun and a huge dust-cloud in the
distance. In times past, our astronomers had seen the glow of millions of
suns, millions upon millions of miles away. But we were never able to
perfect a telescope that could bring a single sun into view.

"Nor did we ever have a chance to do this. The dust-cloud surged out toward
us every twenty years, and our scientists were able to use a