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Paul Hagbolt was paying only half attention to the speakers on the platform The coincidence of the star photos and Doc&039;s notion about planets traveling through hyperspace had distracted hi clock, that only he could hear, had just now begun to tick (once a second, not five ti clocks), he found hi around hiroup of people, the level sand, the faint rattle of the toppling wavelets just beyond the speakers, the old, boarded-up beach houses, the hooded and red-blinking installations of Vandenberg Two thrusting up behind hirass, above all thetiny everything but the globe of Earth and the darkstars

Someone addressed a question to Rama Joan She smiled with her teeth at Beardy and then looked down at her audience, her gaze reen turban hid her hair, though she had the sa of her thin face She looked like a half-starved child herself

Still without speaking, she gazed across the heavens and above her shoulder at the dark moon, then back at her audience

Then she said very quietly, yet harshly: "What do any of us really know about what is out there? Far less than a man imprisoned from birth in a cell under the city would know of theor Moscow or New York I know some of you think advanced races will love and cherish us, but I judge the attitude of more advanced races toward man on the basis of man&039;s attitude toward the ant On that basis I can tell you this much: there are devils out there Devils"

There was a low, grinding sound like steel clockwork being wound Miaow stiffened in Margo&039;s arrowled

Ra the stars, out there, there may be Hindus on&039;t kill a cow and even Jains hisk off whatever they sit on for fear of crushing an ant and ear gauze over their lips to keep fronat, but those will be at nats To us, they will be devils"

Weirdness engulfed Paul Everything around hie of dissolution - frozen, phantasmal He looked toward the stars and thehi that hadn&039;t changed through all history, but then a demon voice deep in his mind said: "But what if the stars should raphs"

Sally Harris led Jake Lesher across the ood platform to the fifth and last car of the Rocket train The only other passengers this trip were a rather ti in the first car and already gripping the safety bar with all four hands

"My God, Sal, the waits I put up with," Jake said "And the sidetracks I go down - I mean up! - to humor you Hasseltine&039;s penthouse - "

"Shh, this ain&039;t no sidetrack, lover boy," she whispered as the launcher hurried past,the last quick check "Now listen hard: as soon as we start to clirab onto the back of the seat for all you&039;re worth with your left hand, because with your other ar me"

"But that&039;s the arm away from you, Sal"

"Now it is," she told hiled at her, then smirked incredulously

"Just you follow directions," she told hi the train started its steep cli her leg in a glearipped his neck, the other swiftly fitted things

"Jesus, Sal," he gasped, "I bet we make the earth move like in For Whoed down at him like a Valkyrie, as the train poised for its swoop and the tow let go "I&039;ll make the stars move!"

Rama Joan said: "Oh, the star people would be aweso as a hunter is to a wild animal that hasn&039;t yet been shot at I&039; about them myself - but to us they would still be as cruel and distant as ninety-nine per cent of our own gods And what are s of a more advanced race? Take the testimony of ten thousand years, if you won&039;t take mine, and you will realize that out thereup therethere are devils"

Ragnarok growled again Miaow flattened herself against Margo&039;s shoulder, digging in with her claws

The Little Man said: "End of totality"

Doc said: "Really, Rao said: "Miaow, it&039;s all right"

Paul looked up and saw the eastern rihten, and it was like a reprieve from prison He suddenly knew that his inco of the eclipse

A half-dozen ht little curlicues, like ghostly white fireworks erupting, squibs and pinwheelsand then blacked out

From his lonely mesa, Asa Holcomb saw the stars near the h the cosateway four ti the blackness aside; and Asa strained eagerly toward it, and his heart swelled with the wonder and majesty of it, and his aorta tore all the way, and he died

Sally Harris saw the stars squiggle just as she and Jake, ht apiece, started to coe Rocket at Coney Island In the blind egoistic world of sexual fulfillment that lies exactly on the boundary between the conscious and unconscious regions of the mind, she knew that the stars were a provincial district of herself - the Marches of Sally Harris - and so she merely chortled throatily: "I did it, Christ! I said I&039;d do it and I did it!"

And even when atop the next sue to the nadir and back up, she saw the squiggling stars replaced by a yellow and purplish disk twenty tih to show up the pinstripe in the shoulders of Jake&039;s suit as his face pressed between her breasts, she leaned back, like a Valkyrie, the safety bar cold across her rump, and cried triuh Bundy said: "Oh, what a kick! Listen, Pepe, there&039;s this crazy old Chinarqan, bigger than King Kong, on the other side of the world kicking his legs up at us, and he&039;s painting golden plates with grenadine so they look like two raindropsthem off to the moon with a reverse twist as he finishes them, and one of thehting all New York Plate lightning"

"I&039; up behind thelued to the eyepiece in the Pal a bit stuffily: "The noun "planet&039;, Miss Katz, is derived froinally it meant simply &039;Wanderer&039;: a body that roves here and there ahtened "Hello, theout of eclipse Yes, definitely And there are colors"

A hand curved over his shoulder protectively, and just about the littlest voice he&039;d ever heard - it was as if Barbara Katz had turned into a grasshopper - said, "Dad, please don&039;t look away froot to prepare yourself for a big shock"

"A shock? What is it, Miss Katz?" he asked nervously, though following instructions

"I&039;m not quite sure," thecover Dad, I think your Wanderer&039;s roved this way - only the Greeks didn&039;t grow &039;e, had shut his eyes for at most two seconds

When he opened theolden light east of the moon in the sky, sixteen tied, reverse-S curve into golden andsofter than velvet yet with a clear-cut, unhazed rim

That much Paul saw as a visual pattern, saw in a flash without analysis The next moment he had thrown himself to the floor, shoulders hunched and head doay fro i overhead, soly o, clutching Miaoas on the floor beside him

Purely by happenstance, Paul&039;s eyes were directed at the progra He automatically read a line: "Our bearded panelist is Ross Hunter, Professor of Sociology, Reed College, Portland, Oregon" - before he realized he was reading easily by the light of the Wanderer

To Don Guillers, his eyes on "the Palace," his left hand gripping the cross-stick handle on the bouan loyalist jeta volcano of silent tracer bullets He ducked in his seat, squinted his eyes, and tightened his neck and shoulders against the slugs They didn&039;t come and they didn&039;t come - the bastard ony