very lines and curves bespoke an alien pattern. One atop the other they piled in a jumbled, sprawling mass like bubbles trapped in cooling lava. Boone could only guess how many miles of ground they covered.

Yet it was a scene of a kind he'd seen before, once, on microreels in IC's confidential archives.

Behind him, Eileen caught her breath. "Those things--Fred, are they buildings?"

"Buildings?" Boone hesitated; fumbled. "I don't know. I guess that you might call them that."

"You guess--? Then you recognize them!" Eileen's blue eyes were suddenly worry-shadowed. "Tell me, Fred. Don't hold back. Is something wrong? Where are we?"

For a long, long moment Boone stared away at the distant dome-pile. "No, nothing's wrong," he said at last. "Maybe it's even better luck than we could hope for." And then: "But wherever we are, Eileen, one thing's for certain: That place is a Helgae city!"

CHAPTER III

It was a situation that held Boone tense, uneasy.

On the one hand, the Helgae domes loomed over the paradisaical flowerland where the sphere-ship lay in strange, silent menace.

On the other, aboard the globe, he could not but chill to the recollection of the monsters.

As for Eileen ... Boone wondered. She had said not a word about their earlier trouble--his desperation-born effort to keep her from making the Titan run; its sudden reversal and her triumph. Yet after the first moments of tenderness and relief at their own survival the clash hung like an invisible wall between them. Out of it, a reserve had come into being--a weighing of words, a wary watching.

Or was that only his imagination?

Regardless, they had to adjust to each other's presence; to work out some solution to their mutual problem.

Cautious exploration finally convinced him that the monsters had vanished from the ship as mysteriously as they'd come. It didn't surprise him; it had been the pattern in every such invasion--nightmare figures materializing out of the void to wreak chaos aboard the IC's Titan-bound craft, then disappearing again, back into whatever dark limbo they called home.

Too, the carrier towards which the dead ensign had 

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