their conditioned calm wore thin, and silenced him finally by threatening to put him under hypnol for the remainder of the trip. Hanlon lapsed into sullen silence and worked secretively at his bonds. The situation stagnated endlessly until the eight-day acceleration period was up, when they released Hanlon from his couch in order to use the radio.

In their eagerness to make contact with Earth they neglected to bind Hanlon again, which was a mistake, since he had not been conditioned as they had against the weird physiological reaction to weightlessness that followed the cutting of the drive.

To Hanlon it was like being dumped suddenly into a bottomless shaft down which he fell endlessly. His heart came into his throat, his ears roared, the instinctive fear of falling inherited from arboreal ancestors knotted his stomach with terror and drove out all reason.

"I'm falling!" he screamed, and snatched at a guide-rail. "Falling...."

Disoriented mechano-controls reacted wildly, refusing him balance, and he smashed into a bulkhead. Geddes and Lowe tackled him while Hovic tried to fend all three gyrating bodies from the instrument board, but Hanlon was not to be quieted. He screamed and threshed like a maniac, his limbs jerking with spastic overcompensation to every movement.

They pinned him down finally and shot enough hypnol into him to keep him unconscious for days. They left him floating limply with his belt snapped to a bulkhead ring and turned their attention to the tight-beam communicator, coddling into intelligibility the first blurred signal that reached them from Earth.

It was as well that Hanlon was not conscious, since his prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. On Earth, war had come—and gone.

They never picked up more than that single dying signal, but before it flickered out they understood that the cataclysm had been atomic, planet-wide, and final. And when that last wavering link with Earth was gone they looked at each other palely over the dead radio and felt the impossible realization of racial extinction rising up like madness behind the psycho-blocks of their carefully-conditioned sanity.

"So Hanlon was right, after all," Lowe said, and choked on the words.

They found nothing to say after that until the impressed urgency of their mission reasserted itself and they turned back to the job at hand. There was still 

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