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atomic pulsations. He saw the dreams of men dissolve into darkness and knew the abstract, detached terror of extinction.
    Yet even as he witnessed these alternate futures his critical faculties remained alert, and he recognized that the choice of visions was mankind’s own. Moreover, he was beginning to understand that there were factions in this group, that some were being swayed toward militant action, and Kyra, the magnanimous, was asking…
    His visions were shattered as a tremor of tension jolted the group, tearing the hands from his own, and Breedlove looked around him as a sleeper awakened. The chanting had ceased with the dropping of the hands, and he heard a sound of scurrying from the bushes. He glanced toward the sound. With his boy’s legs hurtling him away at a pace incredible in an earth child, Crick raced through the gloaming toward the tossed boulders at the mouth of a ravine to the southeast, but Flurea, fleeter of foot than Diana, had taken up pursuit. Halfway to the rocks, the chase ended. Flurea caught Crick’s arm and swung him toward the group, dragging him stumbling and falling back to the mound. Around Breedlove the tension relaxed.
    “Do you have a behavior problem with the boy?” he asked Kyra.
    “Only in that he is a child who longs for a sunlit place to play, and space is cold and dark.”
    She spoke to the group sharply, and as one the people arose. Two of the heavy-bodied females went to take the boy, each grabbing him firmly by a hand. Docile, his face expressionless, Crick walked between them.
    “Breedlove, we must go.”
    Forming around Kyra, the group moved toward the aspen grove and into the gathering dusk. Breedlove watched them go, thinking, Flurea’s function was to catch the boy and for that one purpose she had evolved into a runner. But the behavior of Crick aroused his more intense curiosity. With acumen remarkable in a child, he had studied the terrain with the binoculars before attempting escape, and if he could have reached the boulders and found a crevice narrow enough, he would have been lost to the group forever. Granted that space held terrors for a child, it was still strange that he should flee from his own kind to seek sanctuary on an alien planet.
    A fully grown male would have made good the escape.
    Turning to police the area, Breedlove was bothered by another incongruity. Kyra had told him the group had no leader, but when she spoke the others obeyed. Unless her definition of leadership was far more complex than his own, Kyra had lied to him.

Chapter Three
    On his second morning in the wilderness Breedlove slept until the sun had burned the ground fog from the meadow, and awakened to sit up and gaze around him as if striving to drive away his inner mists with the morning brightness. He felt as one awakening from a bad dream to find its images gone completely from his mind while its baneful aura still lingered. He assumed his subconscious was still roiled by yesterday evening’s vision, and he solicited the serenity of the morning with the same reassuring observation with which, last night, he had invited sleep: if Kyra’s power to convince others was as effective as with him, even if her techniques involved nothing more than hypnosis, she would get the uranium and be gone long before the summer solstice, leaving mankind to its future and unchallenged possession of the earth.
    Fully awake now and, as he supposed, with his superego in control of his emotions, he could realize that Kyra’s presence posed no threat to him personally. But then, there had been no threat as such in the vision he had seen, merely a choice of futures, and mankind had always had suicide as a choice.
    He arose to roll his sleeping bag, tricing it without its poncho covering. The poncho’s drape would be bulky and its Marine Corps mottlings were more functional than decorative, but it would conceal Kyra’s nakedness. Yesterday he had been remiss in not impressing on her more forcefully