Theories and abstracts were fine; almost enough to go on. But not quite. The payoff is always in the doing. Otherwise, test pilots would not command fabulous salaries to risk their necks on the first try-out. But eleven men! Snuffed out because Lee Hayden's word had been taken. Eleven young men.

And here he was, many hours later—back in his room with the bottle on the table ready to blot out the dream—the nightmare of their final agony—that ripped and tore at him everytime he closed his eyes.

Still half sober, he fell into bed and began living it again, tasting the horror, feeling his own flesh grind, his own bones break; living their deaths over just as he had from that first moment when he'd gotten word of the disaster; the last message they'd sent from space.

He awoke in a pool of sweat and realized where he was. He snatched at the bottle, hit it, knocked it off the table. He watched the liquor slop out onto the carpet. He sobbed.

Then, wide-awake—with the stench of fresh whiskey in his nostrils—he saw the man with the golden eyes.

Or at least he thought he was awake. And even as it happened, there was a certainty in his mind.

This is no dream.

He was standing, apparently unobserved, in a huge cave; a strange, fabulous place and the wonder of it caught at his breath and made his heart race.

The cave was high in the side of a mountain. It was as though a huge knife had cut horizontally into solid rock and sliced out a chunk nine feet thick, fifty feet wide, and one hundred feet deep. The walls and ceiling of the cave were of burnished black stone, the floor laid with thick, silken carpet.

Light came soft and shadowless from somewhere, seemingly sourceless, and from the outer lip of the cave where Lee stood, he could see a full, yellow moon riding the night-sky.

The scene—above and below—was one of ecstacy; an overwhelming sensation swept through Lee, something he had never known before. At his feet was a sheer drop of ten thousand feet straight down the face of the mountain to a green valley below. A silver river threaded delicately through a valley hemmed in by towering snow-covered giants. The air was like sharp wine and something within Lee said, I am not dreaming. I know I am here. I can feel the air in my lungs. I can feel a new life vibrating through my flesh. I am still drunk but now it's different. Now 

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