Rynason sat forward and flexed the muscles of his shoulders and back.  They ached as though they had been tense for an hour, and his stomach was still knotted tight.

“There’s a real block there,” he said.  “It’s like a thousand screaming birds flapping in your face.  When you get that far into his mind, you feel it too.”  He sat staring down at his feet, exhausted mentally and physically.

She sat on the bench and looked closely at him.  “Anything else?”

“Yes—­Horng.  At the end, the second time I went in, I could feel him, not only fighting me, but ... hating me.”  He looked up at her.  “Can you imagine actually feeling him, right next to you in your mind like you were one person, hating you?”

Across from them, the huge figure of the alien slowly stood up and looked at them for several long seconds, then turned and left the building.

FOUR

Manning’s quarters were larger than most of the prefab structures in the new Earth town; the building was out near the end of one of the streets, a single-storied plastic-and-metal box on a quick-concrete slab base.  Well, it was as well constructed as any of the buildings in the Edge planetfalls, Rynason reflected as he knocked on the door.  And there was room for all of the survey team workers.

Manning himself let him in, grabbing his hand in a firm grip that nevertheless lacked the man’s usual heavy joviality.  “Come on in; the others are already here,” Manning said, and walked ahead of him into the larger of the two rooms inside.  His step was brisk as always, but there was a touch of real hurry in it which Rynason noticed immediately.  Manning was worried about something.

“All right; we’re all set,” Manning said, leaning against a wall at the front of the room.  Rynason found a seat on the arm of a chair next to Mara and Marc Stoworth, a slightly heavy, blond-haired man in his thirties who wore his hair cut short on the sides but long in back.  He looked like every one of the young corporation executives Rynason had seen in the outworlds, and probably would have gone into that kind of position if he’d had the connections.  He certainly seemed out of place even among the varied assortment of types who worked the archaeological and geological surveys ... but these surveys were conducted by the big corporations who were interested in developing the outworlds; probably Stoworth hoped eventually to move up into the lower management offices when the corporations moved in.

“Gentlemen, there’s something very wrong about these dumb horses we’ve been dealing with,” Manning said.  “I’m going to throw out a few facts at you and see if you don’t come to the same conclusions that Larsborg and I did.”

Rynason leaned over to Mara and murmured, “What’s his problem today?”

But she was frowning.  “He’s got a real one.  Listen.”

Manning had picked up a sheaf of typescript from the table next to him and was flipping through it, his lips pursed grimly.  “This is the report I got yesterday from Larsborg here—­architecture and various other artifacts.  It’s very interesting.  Herb, throw that first photo onto the screen.”