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He left the duffel bag outside the narrow bank of elevators, stepped in and pressed the topmost button. The elevator soared up, depositing him outside the dispatch room. He lowered his head, passing itwithout a glance inside and headed for the coordinator’s office in the penthouse.

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And then, without warning—he was standing on a high parapet, winds flowing icily around his body,ripping at him with enough force to tear his clothes off, ridging his skin with gooseflesh and pain. Belowhim, men screamed and moaned and died over the sounds of clashing steel; and somewhere he heardstone falling with a great crunching rumble like the end of the world. He could not see. He clung hard tothe stone, feeling frost bite with fiery teeth at his stiff fingers, and fought the sickness rising in his throat.

So many men. So many dead, all of them my people and my friends
…

He let go of the stone. His fingers were so cramped that he had to pry them off with his other hand. Hecaught his blowing garments around him, feeling an instant of incongruous physical comfort in the thick furagainst his cold hands, and went swiftly, on groping feet, through the blind dark. He moved as in adream, knowing where he was going without knowing why; his feet knew the familiar path. He felt themmove from flagstone to wood parquet to thick carpeting, then down a long flight of stairs and up anotherflight—farther and farther, until the distant sounds of battle and falling walls were muffled and finallysilenced. His throat was thick and he sobbed as he went. He passed through a low archway,automatically ducking his head against the stone arch he had never seen and would never see. A currentof chill air blew on him. He fumbled in the darkness for something like a loose hood of feathery textures;he drew it downward swiftly and he thrust his head through the feathers, pulling it down.

He felt himself falling back and in the same instant he seemed to rise, to soar upward and swoopoutward on the wings of the feathery substance. The darkness suddenly thinned and was gone, and lightbroke around him—not through his darkened eyes, but through the very skin of his body—and he feltcold reddish light and frosty clouds. Weightless, borne on the feather dress, he soared outward, guidinghimself through the sudden brilliance of dawn.

Quickly he grew accustomed to the bird dress, and balancing on one wing
 
(It’s a long time since Idared to do this.)
 
he turned to look below.

The colors were strange, flat, shapes distorted and concave; he was not seeing them with ordinarymortal eyes. Far below a swarm of men in rough, dark clothing clustered around a rude tower covered inskins, next to an outwork. Arrows flew, men screamed; on the wall a man toppled with a long despairingshriek, and fell out of his sight. He beat harsh pinions, trying to swoop down, and…

He was standing on firm flooring, wiping the sweat of terror from his face.

He was here. He was Dan Barron. He was not flying bodiless except for a few feathers over a weirdtipping landscape, fighting a biting current of wind. He stared at his fingers and put one into his mouth. Itfelt numb, frostbitten.
 
The stone was cold
 
.

It had happened again.

It was so real,
 
so damnably real
 
. His skin was still gooseflesh and he mopped eyes still streaming fromthe bitter wind.
 
Good God
 
, he thought, and shuddered. Had someone been slipping him hallucinogenicdrugs? Why would anyone do that? He had no enemies, as far as he knew. He had no real friends—hewasn’t the type to make them at a strange outpost—but no enemies either. He did his work and mindedhis own business, and he knew no one who envied him either his few possessions or the tough andsomewhat underpaid job he had been doing. The only explanation was that he was mad, psychotic,freaked-out, off his landing base. He realized that in that weird dream, obsession or hallucination, he hadbeen speaking and thinking in Darkovan—the strong accented mountain Darkovan which he understood,but could not speak except for the few words necessary to order a meal or buy some knickknack

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inTradeCity . He shivered again and mopped his face. His feet had carried him within a few feet of the

coordinator’s office, but he stopped, trying to get his breath and his bearings.

This made five times.

The first three times had struck him as abnormally vivid daydreams, born of boredom and hangover andbased on his infrequent but colorful excursions into theOldTown . He had dismissed them without muchthought, even though he woke shuddering with the reality of the surges of fear or hatred which possessedhim in these dreams. The fourth—the fourth had been the near-catastrophe of the spaceport. Barronwasn’t an imaginative man. His possible explanations went as far as a nervous breakdown, or someonewith a grudge slipping him a hallucinatory drug as a grim joke, and not a step further. He wasn’t paranoidenough to think that someone had done it for the purpose it achieved, his disgrace and a spaceportcatastrophe. He was confused, a little scared and a little angry, but not sure if the anger was his own orpart of the strange dream.

He couldn’t continue to delay. He waited a minute more, then straightened his shoulders and knocked atthe coordinator’s door. A light flashed a green COME IN, and he stepped in.

Mallinson, Coordinator of Spaceport Activities for the Terran zone of Darkover, was a hefty man wholooked, at any hour of day or night, as if he’d slept in his uniform. He appeared unimaginative andserious. Any notion Barron might have had about revealing his experiences to his superior, diedunspoken. Nevertheless, Mallinson looked straight at Baron, and he was the first person who’d done sofor five days.

Without preamble he said, “All right, what the hell happened? I pulled your file; you’re listed as adamned good man. In my experience, men don’t pile up a perfect record and then rack it up like
 
that
 
;the man who’s heading for a big mistake starts out by making dozens of little mistakes first, and we havetime to pull him off the spot before he really piles something up. Were you sick? Not that it’s anexcuse—if you were you should have reported and requested a relief man. We expected to find youdead of a heart attack—we didn’t think anything else would slow you down like that.”

Barron thought about the dispatcher’s room and its enormous board which patterned all traffic in and outof this spaceport. Mallinson said, not giving him time to answer, “You don’t drink or drug. You know,most men last about eight months on the dispatch board; then the responsibility starts giving themnightmares, they start making little fumbles, and we pull them off and transfer them. When you nevermade even a little fumble, we should have realized that you just didn’t have sense enough—the littlefumbles are the mind’s way of yelling for help, yelling ‘This is too much for me, get me out of here.’

When you didn’t, we should have pulled you off anyway. That’s why you weren’t cashiered, kicked outwith seven reps, and slapped with a millicred fine. We left you on the board five years, and we shouldhave known we were asking for trouble.”

Barron realized that Mallinson hadn’t expected any answer. People who made mistakes of that calibernever could explain why. If they’d known why they could have guarded against it.

“With your record, Barron, we could transfer you out to the Rim, but we have an opening here; I

understand you speak Darkovan?”

“TradeCitylanguage. I understand the other, but I fumble in it.”

“Even so. Know anything about mapping and exploring?” Barron jumped. It had been a ship from M &

E which had nearly crashed five days ago, and that sector was in his mind, but a second glance at

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Mallinson convinced him that the man was simply asking for information, not needling. He said, “I’veread a book or two on xenocartography—no more.”

“Lens grinding?”

“The principles. Most kids make a small telescope some time or other; I did.”

“That’s plenty. I didn’t want an expert,” Mallinson said with a grim smile. “We’ve got plenty of them, but

it would put Darkovan backs up. Now, how much do you know about general Darkovan culture?”

Wondering where all this was leading, Barron said, “Orientation Lectures Two, Three and Four, fiveyears ago. Not that I’ve needed it much, working in the port.”

“Well then, you know the Darkovans never bothered a great deal with small technology— telescopes, microscopes and the like? Their supposed sciences go in other directions, and I don’t know much about them either; nobody does except a few anthropologists and sociological experts. The facts remain; we, meaning the Board of Terran Affairs, sometimes get requests for minor technological help from individuals. Not from the government—if there is any government on Darkover, which I personally am inclined to doubt—but that’s beside the point. Somebody or other out there, I’m not sure about the details, decided that for forest-fire control and fire watching, telescopes would be handy little gadgets to have around. Somehow the idea crawled up whatever channels it had to come through, and came to the Council of Elders inTradeCity . We offered to sell them telescopes. Oh, no, they said politely, they’d rather have someone teach their men how to grind them, and to supervise their construction, installation and use. It’s not the sort of thing we can send up a slip to Personnel for and find, just like that. But here you are, out of a job, and lens grinding listed in your comprehensive file as a hobby. Start today.”

Barron scowled. This was a job for an anthropologist, a liaison officer, a specialist in Darkovanlanguage, or—
fire watching! Hell, that’s a kid’s job
! He said stiffly, “Sir, let me remind you that this isout of my sector and out of my specialty. I have no experience in it. I’m a scheduling expert and dispatchman—”

“Not as of five days ago, you aren’t,” Mallison said brutally. “Look, Barron, you’re through in your own line; you know that. We don’t want to ship you out in disgrace—not without some idea of what happened to you. And your contract isn’t up for two years. We want to fit you in somewhere.”

There was nothing Barron could say to that. Resigning before a contract was up meant losing yourholdback pay and your fee passage back to your home planet—which could strand you on a strangeworld and wipe out a year’s pay. Technically he had a right to complain about being assigned outside hisspecialty field. But technically they had a right to fire him with seven reps, blacklist him, fine him, andpress charges for gross negligence. He was getting a chance to come out of this—not clean, but notwrecked for good in the service.

“When do I start?” he asked. It was the only question he had left.

But he did not hear the answer. As he scanned Mallinson’s face suddenly it blurred.

He was standing on a stretch of soft grass; it was night, but it was not dark. All around him the nightflamed and roared with a great fire, reaching in tendrils of ravening flame far above his head. And in themidst of the flame there was a woman.

Woman
?

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She was almost inhumanly tall and slender, but girlish; she stood bathed in the flame as if standingcarelessly under a waterfall. She was not burning, not agonized. She looked merry and smiling. Herhands were clasped on her naked breasts, the flames licking around her face and her flame-colored hair. And then the girlish, merry face wavered and became supernally beautiful with the beauty of a greatgoddess burning endlessly in the fire, a kneeling woman bound in golden chains…

… “and you can arrange all that downstairs in Personnel and Transportation,” Mallinson finished firmly, shoving back his chair. “Are you all right, Barron? You look a bit fagged. I’ll bet you haven’t been eating or sleeping. Shouldn’t you see a medic before you go? Your card is still good in Section 7. It’s going to be all right, but the sooner you leave, the better. Good luck.” But he didn’t offer to shake hands, and Barron knew it wasn’t all right at all.

He stumbled over his own feet leaving the office, and the face of the burning woman, in its inhumanecstasy, went with him in terror and amazement.

He thought,
 
what in the world
 
—
 
any world
—
 
has happened to me
?

And, in the name of all the gods of Earth, space and Darkover
—
 
why
?