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The Sphinx Daniel Hall met the enemy in the blue skies of NRGC 984-D but it cannot be said that the enemy was his. Neither can it be said that he was the enemy's. In point of fact, about all that can be said about the encounter is that it never quite came off. One minute there were two trim scout ships, one Terran and the other Uvelian, arrowing toward each other, and the next minute there were two trim scout ships veering off at right angles to each other and dropping rapidly planetward. What happened to the Uvelian pilot will be touched upon later. Right now, the camera is focused on Daniel Hall. He came down near the edge of a wide tableland and plowed a long furrow in a stretch of snow-white sand. The impact tore one of the viewscope brackets loose and sent it ricocheting from wall to wall. On the third ricochet it sideswiped Hall, ripping through both layers of his spacesuit and tearing open his left arm from elbow to shoulder. Still not satisfied, it struck the radio panel and smashed the transmitter. Then it gave up the ghost and dropped to the deck. Hall hadn't meant to make such a hard landing. He hadn't meant to make any kind of a landing. An invisible force had seized the controls and torn the ship out of the sky, and he hadn't been able to do a thing about it. He tried the controls now. He tried them singly and in pairs. No matter how he tried them, they did not respond. Next, he had a go at the radio. He knew even while he was beaming his S.O.S. that it would never get beyond the stratosphere and that all he would receive for his pains would be static. He was right. He turned the radio off. Well anyway, NRGC 984-D had a reasonably amiable climate and a reasonably amiable atmosphere–his instruments told him that much. So he could stay alive for a little while at least. Hall grinned. "A little while" was right. The Terran fleet's imminent engagement with the Uvelian wouldn't be postponed merely because an unimportant space scout who had been sent on ahead to determine whether or not the planet in whose vicinity
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