"Yes, that's part of a big Group Housing Project downtown."

"Where can we get a saucer?"

"The roof."

"Unlock the door," Kane said. "And just pretend everything is happy and that we're relating beautifully to one another. Now listen—I'll kill you if you try anything else. I hope you believe it because I really will. What you fellows intend doing with me, as far as I'm concerned, is worse than murder."

They stepped onto one of several saucers decorating the roof of the Midtown Hotel. The rotary blades in the ten foot platform whirred under them, and Kane felt the saucer rise up to a thousand feet, then dip downtown. The air was full of them and only some kind of sixth-sense seemed to keep them from jamming into one another.

There was never less than two on a saucer. And Kane noticed that most of the saucers were flying in Groups like aimless geese.

Kane jumped from the saucer and ran across the roof landing of the Sunny Hill project building. There were a number of them like huge blocks arranged in some incomprehensible plan.

Kane glanced back to see number one leaping from the saucer and running in the opposite direction. Kane ran on toward the elevator. He knew he didn't have much time, but what bothered him was the authority he was running against. Public opinion was a general attitude, not a cop car, or a squad of officers with guns. Getting out of line, Kane figured, was usually its own punishment—isolation, loneliness, social ostracism.

But what about the exception? The guy who fought conformity and the majority opinion.

Who would they put on Kane? Or what? It would help to know what he was running from. What concrete force or power would try to stop him.

Then he saw her running toward him.

Her face was flushed and the wind blew her dress tightly against her slim body as she stopped and looked at him.

He took hold of her arm.

"We've got to hurry," she said. "The Group knows I've run away. The Staff will be after me."

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