boat, sleekly aerodynamic. Presumably the Zolotoyans did not have to bother about going into orbit and using shuttle rockets; even their biggest vessels landed directly. The lean blue shapes maneuvered with precision blasts, so close to absolute efficiency that only the dimmest glow revealed any jets at all.

"Automatic, or remote-controlled," decided Holbrook in wonder. "Live flesh couldn't take that kind of accelerations."

Fire blossomed in space, dazzling their eyes so they sat half blind for minutes afterward. "Magnesium flares," croaked Grushenko. "In a perfect circle around us. Precision shooting—to warn us they can put a nuclear shell in our airlock if they wish." He blinked out the viewport. Zolotoy had subtly changed position; it was no longer ahead, but below. He chuckled in a parched way. "We are not about to offer provocation, comrades."

Muted clanks beat through the hull and their bones. Holbrook saw each whale shape as a curve in the ports, like a new horizon. "Two of them," said Ekaterina. "They have laid alongside. There is some kind of grapple." She plucked nervously at the harness of her chair. "I think they intend to carry us in."

"We couldn't do that stunt," muttered Holbrook.

A day came back to him. He had been a country boy, remote even from the collective farms, but once when he was seven years old he sent in a winning Party slogan (he didn't know better then) and was awarded a trip to Europe. Somehow he had entered alone that museum called Notre Dame de Paris; and when he stood in its soaring twilight he realized how helplessly small and young he was.

He cut the engines. For a moment free fall clutched at his stomach, then a renewed pressure swiveled his chair about in the gymbals. The scout boat was being hauled around Zolotoy, but downward: they were going to some specific place on the planet for some specific purpose.

He looked through his loneliness at Ekaterina, and found her staring at him. Angrily, she jerked her face away, reached out and grasped the hand of Ilya Grushenko.

CHAPTER IV

On the way, the humans decompressed their atmosphere until it approximated that of Zolotoy. There was enough oxygen to support lethargic movement, but they donned small compression pumps, capacitor-powered, worn on the back and feeding to a nose-piece. Their starved lungs expanded gratefully. Otherwise they 

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