g him on. Which do you think won in the end?"

"Oh, Ramsey, I could kiss you!"

"Go right ahead," Ramsey said, and she did.

They opened the airlock. They went outside smiling.

But Vardin, who went with them, wasn't smiling. There was sadness
instead.

* * * * *

In cumbersome spacesuits, the five Irwadians made their way from the
_Dog Star_ to the _Enterprise_. Ramar Chind and his three policemen
carried m.g. guns; Garr Symm was unarmed. Chind used a whorl-neutralizer
to force the pattern of the lock on the outer door of the _Enterprise's_
airlock. Then the five of them plunged inside the ship.

The inner door was not closed.

The _Enterprise_ was empty.

Garr Symm looked doubtfully at the gray murkiness behind them. Although
the _Dog Star_ stood out there less than a quarter of a mile away, they
couldn't see it through the murk.

"Where did they go?" Ramar Chind asked.

Symm waved vaguely behind them.

Chind and his men turned around.

Gritting his teeth against the fear which welled up like nausea from the
pit of his stomach, Garr Symm went with them.

At that moment they all heard the music.

"You hear it?" Ramsey asked softly. His voice did not carry on the
airless world, of course. But he spoke, and the words were understood,
not merely by Margot, who could read his mind, but by Vardin as well.

"Music," said Margot. "Isn't it--beautiful?"

* * * * *

Ramsey nodded slowly. He could barely see Margot, although he held her
hand. He could barely see Vardin although they stood hand in hand too.
The music was un-Earthly, incapable of repetition, indescribably the
loveliest sound he had ever heard. He wanted to sink down into the
obscuring gray murk and weep and listen to the haunting, sad, lovely
strains of sound forever.

"What can it possibly be?" Margot asked.

Surprisingly, it was Vardin who answered. "Music of the Spheres," she
said. "It's a legend on Vega III, my world."

"And on Earth," Ramsey said.

Vardin told them: "On all worlds. And, like all such legends, it has a
basis in reality. This is the basis."

That didn't sound like timid little Vardin at all. Ramsey listened in
amazement. He thought he heard Vardin laugh.

Music. But didn't the notes need the medium of time in which to be
heard? How could they hear music here at all? Or were they hearing it?
Perhaps it merely impinged on their minds, their souls, just as