the rising sun. Jan was so fascinated by the spectacle that his coordination failed him. He was conscious of the white-robed people fleeing in terror as he fought to regain control of the aircar.

They crashed. Their speed had been only about 50 miles per hour and the protectors saved them from injury. They scrambled out to survey the damage.

"Well, it won't fly again soon," Jan said. He breathed deeply of the thin air.

"What a hell of a place to crash," the girl said. "Those are Mohcans holding their spring equinox festival. They'll probably stone me." She looked down at her transparent gown. The white-robed people had resumed their places and were singing a hymn as though nothing had happened. It was slow, sad, august, a mighty organ sound of human voices.

The girl's face was chalk white. "Let's run for it," she begged. "They're dangerous. They're dangerous as hell. Please believe me." She turned and started to run down the path that had once been the cogroad, stumbling in her high-heeled shoes.

Jan ran after her, weaving as though the mountain were a deck on the high seas.

He grabbed her by the arm. "Hey, baby, they don't sound dangerous," he said. "They're just singing a kind of hymn as though nothing happened. The only rise we got out of them was the way they scattered when we started to crash."

"Come on, come on," she cried. "I know about these people. They'll be after us when the hymn stops."

"Okay, but you're talking foolish," he said. They started walking down the mountain. "Hell, those people won't do us any harm. They're too busy singing." He pulled out a pack of cigarets and lit one.

"You're space-crazy," she said. "Didn't you ever hear of the massacre of scientists at Harvard, or what they did to the chorus girls in 'Sex Happy'?"

Tugging at his arm to get him to hurry, she told him about the Mohcans. The sect appeared toward the end of the war. Historically they were a blend of Christian, Mohammedan, Communist, and Hindu. Their prophet and leader, until his martyrdom, was Smith Akandi, an English-Hindu half-caste who was reared in Moscow. Their creed was anti-science and anti-pleasure. Thousands of them were executed during the war, but hundreds of thousands were converted.

"Half way I am for them," the girl said. "Just 

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