Father took a deep breath. “What,” he asked, “is that smell?” “Our daughters have taken up painting,” said mother.

“Meg and Marie?” Father hung up his hat and proceeded into the living room, holding mother's arm. “Painting pictures?”

“The latter-day Van Goghs are upstairs in their inner sanctum. If you knock three times and are very polite, they might let you see.”

“By all means. This I must investigate.”

Advancing alone into the rarefied upper country of the house, which smelled of sun-tan powder, perfume and bubble baths, he rapped discreetly on the door of his daughters' room. The smell was stronger here, the sharp autumnal smell of turpentine and oil, a creative odor, the odor of genius and imagination. He was smiling quietly when the door opened.

There was a crowd pressed together in front of the shop.

Crowell light-footed it into that crowd, his face long and sad. He cast a glance back over one lean shoulder, muttered to himself, and widened a lane through the people, quick.

A hundred yards behind him a low shining black beetle car hummed to the kerb. A door clicked open, and the fat man with the grey-white face climbed heavily out, his expression one of silent, dead-pan hatred. Two bodyguards sat in the front seat.

You don't want death and you don't expect death. Something goes wrong, your rocket tilts in space, a planetoid jumps up, blackness, movement, hands over the eyes, a violent pulling back of available powers in the forejets, the crash.

The darkness. In the darkness, the senseless pain. In the pain, the nightmare.

He was not unconscious.

Your name? asked hidden voices. Sale, he replied in whirling nausea. Leonard Sale. Occupation? cried the voices. Space man! he cried, alone in the night. Welcome, said the voices. Welcome, welcome. They faded.