that it made Price shiver.

Yet the four Vurna came straight on. The Star Lords, they from unguessable spaces who had smashed Earth like a child's toy, to make it their footstool. Price pressed closer to the gun-slot. He wanted to see them very clearly indeed.

Especially one of them.

The star lords were tall and well-formed, and they looked much like Earthmen except that they wore tight-fitting garments of various colors, but all cut to the same pattern. Price guessed that they were uniforms, with the colors indicating rank or branch. The other chief difference was the coloring of the Star Lords themselves. They were bronzed as though by radiations fiercer than any known on Earth, and their hair was silver. Not white, and not pallid, but a rich silver. The men--three of the four were men--wore their hair short.

The woman wore hers long, rippling onto her shoulders. It caught the sunset light and gleamed like hot metal. Her uniform was a deep crimson, duskier than flame, molding her long thighs and her high, just-full-enough breasts.

Sawyer was speaking to them now, his voice rolling out harshly in the silence. "If you're still hunting for that plane, my answer's the same. I've never seen one."

One of the Vurna men, who seemed to have the authority, stepped a pace in front of the other two men and the woman.The woman had raised her head and was looking restlessly at the blank or shuttered windows of the timber houses. Price felt uneasily that she knew he was there and was looking at him through the gun-slot. But that, of course, was ridiculous.

"Sawyer, listen to me," said the man of the Vurna. He spoke clear but stilted English, with strong tones of some alien tongue in its unaccustomed rhythms. He wore a black uniform with a small gold sunburst at the collar. It was impossible to guess his age. And while he kept his voice quiet and his manner calm, there was anger in him.

There was anger in Price too, a deep rage growing in him as he looked at the men and the woman who stood here like conquerors on the planet they had ruined, indifferent to the hatred they faced.

"Here is no time and no place for stubborn obstructions," the Vurna man was saying. "Things move quickly now. We have an enemy before us so vast and powerful that we dare not have one also at our backs, no matter how weak. I ask you to believe that, Sawyer. I ask you to 

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