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Clarence Dodd said to hirees, and it reversed the momentum?" And when Hunter nodded heavily, the Little Man coical"

Hunter snatched the black hat off theit up as if to throw it down and stamp on it Then he just looked at it in his hand

There was a faint hollow crack as the small boulder hit five hundred feet below and the sound came up

On the sunbeaten mesa in Arizona, as if it were a Parsi Tower of Silence, vultures tore away the last shreds of the flesh of Asa Holco red bone

Paul Hagbolt rested lightly against the warerishka&039;s saucer He gazed down at Earth&039;s northern ice cap breaking up, the white crust of frozen water lifted and collapsed by the great tides that had been h the Greenland Sea, Baffin Bay, and the Bering Strait Almost the whole Arctic zone was out of shadow, as Earth&039;s su northern hemisphere tilted toward the sun

The interior of the saucer was dark, but sohted ice, which twinkled with highlights wherever ice-tables tilted to reflect the sun directly - stars in a white sky

Tigerishka was stretched out against the , too, a few feet fro Miaow, but now the little cat dreay fros against the violet-barred, green-furred shoulder, and sprang off across Paul into the flowerbank beyond him - presuht Miaow had adapted quickly to free fall and delighted in wor the thick vines, her tiny face cat-s out between the leaves and flowers fro sound that was rather like a sigh It occurred to Paul that she ht of people dying as they looked down at Earth He almost started to tell her that there was, or yesterday had been, a Russian weather station at the North Pole, but decided she could read that in his thoughts if she wanted to

Without warning the saucer began to mount very swiftly First the ice cap, then the whole Earth, shrank rapidly

Paul repressed his reactions Excited e was not aderishka could work the control panel without touching or even looking at it

Stars came out everywhere As Terra continued to shrink, the Wanderer ca into view It too had a polar cap of sorts, a lopsided yellow one against the violet background, but with a yellow neck going down from it - the neck of the dinosaur From here the yellow shape was like a battle axe

They were ht: none caan to show half phases, the Wanderer with the crescent of rew dark in the saucer as the ice light faded When the planets finally stopped shrinking, they were two suishable half ely unfamiliar to Paul, which one sees froreat amazement he realized that the saucer had mounted several millionnot too far below the speed of light

The effect was as if he and Tigerishka, walking through a city, had retreated into a big unlit park and were now seeing the lights of the city across several acres of dark lawn and trees After a bit, it did begin to feel very lonely

Tigerishka said quietly: "You feel like God? The Earth your footstool?"

Paul said: "I don&039;t know Could I change the past? If soerishka did not answer, though it seemed to Paul in the darkness that she slowly shook her head

There was a tiain the short h Then, softly: "Paul?"

"Yes?" he asked quietly

She said, softer still, but rapidly: "We are wicked We hurt your planet terribly We are afraid"

She went on, this tihtiness: "Your lost generation, your Hungarian refugees, your anarchists, your Satanists, your beats, your fallen angels, your parole-jumpers, your juvenile delinquents - we&039;re like those Running, running, running Every step, pounding the hollow planetary paveht-years"

He knew she was picking the words, concepts, and ies out of his mind, yet his mind did not feel it at all

She continued: "The Wanderer is our getaway car, our escape wagon - a very hip and handsoames! Skies to suit every taste - sunsets to order! Hot and cold running gravity in every stateroom - pro or anti, take your pick! The Star of the Rejected Satan&039;s Ark!"

And noas the voice of a rather bigger girl, covering guilt with bravado and with lurid ies chosen with a deliberate facetiousness

She went on: "Oh, what a stylish Planet of the Damned! We paint our air on top for privacy That shocked theht we lamor Well, we did!"

"The Painted Planet," Paulto match her e before she did

She flashed back: "Like your Desert, yes And your wild painted women, no? Violet and yellow, like a desert dawn We even paint the Wanderer&039;s boats to er than liners, dinghies like this Oh, we&039;re the top of the ers on Satan&039;s Ark, we devil host, we angels going bu her ain at the two half h not entirely grave

"The Wanderer sails the true void: hyper space You want a rugged roadway, a cruel sea, a storm that makes a hurricane seem a breeze, a nova-front, a match-flash? Try the void! Forht, no atoy we superbeasts can tap - as yet! It is like quicksand youdesert, waterless, which you nant seething that&039;s to space as the unconscious is to consciousness Alleys to which the streetlight never gets, mouthless and twisted, full of dirty death - or dark, cold, oily water under docks, roiled by great waves The Sargasso of the Starships! The Graveyard of Lost Planets! Oh, a els nausea and night, formless Sea of Hell!

"This whole star-marqueed universe of ours - the cosmos you think rock-based, firm as God - rides in the endless hyperspatial storust Andthe Wanderer sails only in the fist of wind that holds the scrap We&039;re ti the coast"

Paul stared out at the randomly scattered, lonely stars and wondered why he had always so easily accepted that they represented order

"The power of a billion fission piles," Tigerishka went on, "are what you need to burst into the void - and still more power, fantastic subtlest skill, and luck, too, to burst out The Wanderer eats moons for breakfast and asteroids for snacks! Or rather, they are eaten by the void the Wanderer sails through, that gobbler of neutrinos - food tossed to hyper-spatial wolves to buy our way

"It takes no ti and the landfall tierishka continued, "but oh, the wit it takes to spy your port, the waits before you burst back to the world! - like threading an unknown coast in thickest fog In hyperspace there are signs of our space here - shadows of suns, of planets and of ases and of emptiness - but they are far more difficult to read than radar in a sky chockful of foil, than unknown, drip-worn, lilyphs within a cavern half as old as ti for ht Our insulation from raw hyperspace had shrunk to zero; we almost lost our sky and atmosphere; no one could venture on our upper deck except the inorganic giants which dwell there - the crystal minds which are like colored hills

"At that weup soues of fuel we could not spare, but each tiht or else the vectors wrong, the exit spots not near enough your sun or to a moon that wholly suited us"

Paul interposed automatically: "Only two false exits? There were four photos of twisting starfields"

"Four photos, but only two false exits - one near Pluto, one near Venus," she asserted sharply "Don&039;t interrupt ed our exit near youra perfect shadow We surfaced from the sea of hyperspace But ere almost powerless by then Why, if we&039;d had to do battle we could barely have thrown the Wanderer into null gravity for erishka!" Paul protested "You ravity field, so that it wouldn&039;t have caused quakes and huge tides on Earth - and you didn&039;t?"

"I&039;m not the Wanderer&039;s captain!" she snarled at hiravity to catch and crush your mented by local churn-fields and torque-volueneral fuel reserve for battle - that&039;s obvious, surely!"

Paul said, "But Tigerishka, compared to the Wanderer&039;s, the world&039;s space forces and atomic weapons are a joke What conceivable battle - "

"Paul, I told you once ere afraid" There was a dark violet flash from her petaled irises as she turned her head away fro planet in the universe"