ized that
Kyla was gripping my arm, looking up imploringly into my face. I shook
my head rather groggily. "What's the matter?"

"You frightened me," she said in a shaky little voice, and I suddenly
knew what had happened. I tensed with savage rage against Jay Allison.
He couldn't even give me the splinter of life I'd won for myself, but
had to come sneaking out of my mind, how he must hate me! Not half as
much as I hated him, damn him! Along with everything else, he'd scared
Kyla half to death!

She was kneeling very close to me, and I realized that there was one way
to fight that cold austere fish of a Jay Allison, send him shrieking
down into hell again. He was a man who hated everything except the cold
world he'd made his life. Kyla's face was lifted, soft and intent and
pleading, and suddenly I reached out and pulled her to me and kissed
her, hard.

"Could a ghost do this?" I demanded, "or this?"

She whispered, "No--oh, no," and her arms went up to lock around my
neck. As I pulled her down on the sweet-smelling moss that carpeted the
chamber, I felt the dark ghost of my other self thin out, vanish and
disappear.

Regis had been right. It had been the only way ...

* * * * *

The Old One was not old at all; the title was purely ceremonial. This
one was young--not much older than I--but he had poise and dignity and
the same strange indefinable quality I had recognized in Regis Hastur.
It was something, I supposed, that the Terran Empire had lost in
spreading from star to star. A feeling of knowing one's own place, a
dignity that didn't demand recognition because it had never lacked for
it.

Like all trailmen he had the chinless face and lobeless ears, the
heavy-haired body which looked slightly less than human. He spoke very
low--the trailmen have very acute hearing--and I had to strain my ears
to listen, and remember to keep my own voice down.

He stretched his hand to me, and I lowered my head over it and murmured,
"I take submission, Old One."

"Never mind that," he said in his gentle twittering voice, "sit down, my
son. You are welcome here, but I feel you have abused our trust in you.
We dismissed you to your own kind because we felt you would be happier
so. Did we show you anything but kindness, that after so many years you
return with armed men?"

The reproof in his red eyes was hardly an auspicious beginning. I said
helplessly, "Old One, the men with me are not ar