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10 Chapters
It was strange, how easy it was to step right out of your own life, right out of the familiar Earth into cosmic mystery! As easy, Birrel was to think later, as opening a door.... As Birrel walked int…
Birrel still couldn't take it in. Two hours had passed, and he sat in Connor's office, listening, arguing, still not believing. Paley was there, hunched as though half asleep in a chair in …
They came at ten minutes before midnight. Birrel had been sitting in this cell for some twenty hours. The cell was deep in a jail in downtown Manhattan. It was a solitary cell, for a solitary and imp…
Birrel felt the imminence of onrushing danger. Danger, not just to himself, but to all his world. For in him lay the only chance to find out about the threat to Earth before it materialized. Who thei…
There were six people in the living-room of the old New Jersey farmhouse, and only one of them was an Earthman. It seemed a madly impossible thing, to Birrel. The year was nineteen-fifty-seven and it…
They sat together in a brushy hollow by a stream. Frogs chorused in the marshy spots. The stars swung overhead, above the dark trees. Close by in the warm night an owl sang a weird fluttering song to…
They were all in the ship's bridge now. Thile and Kara and a young man named Vray were conferring tensely with the radarman and checking a bristling array of instruments. Birrel was looking at s…
There were six of the Irrians, counting Vannevan. They wore vac-suits and they were all armed. Two of them went immediately to Thile and Kara and searched them for weapons, but they had none. The tim…
Birrel had been close to death before, but never closer. Those hands clamped down, shutting off voice and breath, and the weight of a powerful body bore on him, holding him. He heard quick harsh brea…
The ship swept in toward the night side of Earth in a great curve, and first of all Earthmen that had ever lived, Birrel felt the sharp, nostalgic emotion of coming back to the world that would alway…
