dn't seem to mind that she had no clothes on. Oh, it
was so wonderful. Jack was drifting on a yielding and wine-tinted air
and warmed with a wind that seemed to swell him out like a happy
balloon....

Suddenly he was falling, hurtling helplessly and sickeningly through a
void while a cold and drab blast gouged his skin and spun him around and
around. The world he had always known shoved hard against him. Again he
felt the blow in the solar plexus and saw the grey tentacles of the
living reality reach for his heart.

Jack looked up at the stranger, who was just about to put his spectacles
on the bridge of his long nose. His eyelids were closed. Jack never did
see the pink eyes.

That didn't bother him. He had other things to think about. He crouched
beside the chair while his brain tried to move again, tried to engulf a
thought and failed because it could not become fluid enough to find the
idea that would move his tongue to shriek, _No! No! No!_

And when the salesman rose and placed his papers in his case and patted
Jack on the head and bent his opaque rose spectacles at him and said
good-by and that he wouldn't be coming back because he was going out of
town to stay, Jack was not able to move or say a thing. Nor for a long
time after the door had closed could he break through the mass that
gripped him like hardened lava. By then, no amount of screams and
weeping would bring Mister back. All his father could do was to call a
doctor who took the boy's temperature and gave him some pills.

IV

Jack stood inside the wire and bent his neck back to watch a huge black
and silver oyster feel the dusk for a landing-field with its single
white foot and its orange toes. Blindingly, lights sprang to attention
over the camp.

When Jack had blinked his eyes back to normal, he could see over the
flat half-mile between the fence and the ship. It lay quiet and
glittering and smoking in the flood-beams. He could see the round door
in its side swing open. Men began filing out. A truck rumbled across the
plain and pulled up beside the metal bulk. A very tall man stepped out
of the cab and halted upon the running board, from which he seemed to be
greeting the newcomers or giving them instructions. Whatever he was
saying took so long that Jack lost interest.

Lately, he had not been able to focus his mind for any length of time
upon anything except that one event in the past. He wandered around and
whipped glances at his comrad