the end they talked out their problem because there was nothing else they could do.

"We're men," Maxon said, not as if he must convince himself but as if it were a premise that had to be made, a starting point for all logic. "We're reasoning creatures. If the trouble lies in ourselves we can find its source and its reason for being."

He picked Vaughn first because Vaughn had been first to sense the wrongness and because the most sensitive link in a chain is also predictably its weakest.

"Try," Maxon said. "I know there are no words to describe this thing, but get as close as you can."

Vaughn tried. "It isn't home-sickness. It's a different thing altogether from nostalgia. It's not just fear. I'm afraid—not of any thing, just afraid in the way a child is afraid of falling in his dreams, when he's really had no experience with falling because he's never fallen more than a few inches in his life.... When I think of my wife, it's not the same at all as if I were just in some far corner of the Earth with only land and water between us. Even if I were marooned on an uncharted island somewhere with no hope of seeing home again, I wouldn't feel this way. There wouldn't be this awful pulling."

Ragan agreed with Vaughn that the Feeling was essentially a pull, but beyond agreement could add nothing. Ragan had covered the world without forming a tie to hold him; one place was as good as another and he felt no loss for any particular spot on Earth.

"I only want to be back there," he said simply. "Anywhere but here."

"I was born on a farm in New England," Walraven said. "Out of the land, like my father and his people before him. I'm part of that land, no matter how far from it I go, because everything I am came from it. I feel uprooted. I don't belong here."

Uprooted was the key for which they had hunted.

Maxon said slowly, "There are wild animals on Earth that can't live away from their natural homes. Insects—how does a termite feel, cut off from its hive? Maybe that's our trouble. Something bigger than individual men made the human race what it is. Maybe we've been a sort of composite being all along, without knowing it, tied together by the need of each other and not able to exist apart. Maybe no one knew it before because no one was ever isolated in the way we are."

Walraven had more to say, almost defiant in his earnestness. "This is going to 

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