out at him from the Central Masses. It might as well be now.

His perceptions alert, he plunged toward the heart of the galaxy.

Thought speeds where light plods. The mind of Herrell McCray covered light-millenia in a moment. It skipped the drifty void between spiral arms, threaded dust clouds, entered the compact central galactic sphere to which our Earth's sector of the galaxy is only a remote and unimportant appendage. Here a great globular cluster of suns massed around a common center of gravity. McCray shrank himself to the perspective of a human body and stared in wonder. Mankind's Sol lies in a tenuous, stretched-out arm, thinly populated by stellar standards: if Earth had circled one of these dense-clustered suns, what a different picture of the sky would have greeted the early shepherds! Where Man's Earthbound eyes are fortunate to count a thousand stars in a winter sky, here were tens of thousands, bright enough to be a Sirius or a Capella at the bottom of a sink of atmosphere like Earth's—tens of billions of stars in all, whirling close to each other, so that star greets star over distances that are hardly more than planetary. Sol's nearest neighbor star is four light-years away. No single sun in this dense, gyrating central mass was as much as one light-year from its fellows.

Here were suns that had been blazing with mature, steady light when Sol was a mere contracting mass of hydrogen—whose planets had cooled and spawned life before Earth's hollows cupped the first scalding droplets that were the beginnings of seas.

On these ancient worlds life existed.

McCray had not understood all of what Hatcher had tried to communicate to him, but he had caught the terror in Hatcher's thoughts. Hatcher's people had fled from these ancients many millenia before—fled and hidden in the heart of the Orion gas cloud, their world and all. Yet even there they were not safe. They knew that in time the Old Ones would find them. And it was this fear that had led them to kidnap humans, seeking allies in the war that could not forever be deferred.

Hatcher's people were creatures of thought. Man was the wielder of physical forces—"paranormal" to Hatcher, as teleportation and mind-seeing were "paranormal" to McCray. The Old Ones had mastered both.

McCray paused at the fringe of the cluster, waiting for the touch of contemptuous hate. It came and he recoiled a thousand light-years before he could stop.

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