Badly as it had started, Jonnie could not believe the sensation of flight.

He was lost in the huge copilot seat and the belt that was supposed to keep him in would not contract enough to do so. But he braced himself with a grip on a handhold and watched the Earth race away from him.

He felt awe. Was this how it was to be an eagle? Is that how the world looked from the sky?

The panorama of the mountains to the west began to open in relief. And in a few moments he realized they were now higher than Highpeak, seen whitely in the cold clear air.

For fifteen minutes he was enthralled. They were at a height of about four miles. He had never realized there was so much world! Or that one could feel so thrilled.

Then Terl said, “You can operate any of the mine machines, can't you, animal? Now this is no different except that it goes in three dimensions, not just two. Those controls in front of you duplicate these. Fly it!”

Terl's paws came off the controls. The plane immediately flopped over.

Jonnie was thrown against the door. The plane staggered and began a sickening dive.

Jonnie had not paid any attention to what Terl was doing with the controls before. They were a maze of levers and buttons. He gripped the security belt and got himself into position to reach things. He started pushing buttons.

The plane went crazy. It soared, it swooped. The ground rushed up and sped away.

Terl's laughter cut above the roar. Jonnie began to realize the creature was a bit high on kerbango. Celebrating indeed.

With a steadying concentration, Jonnie looked at the controls. As on all Psychlo equipment, everything was marked. Some of the terms he didn't know. But he spotted an additional

button alongside every button familiar in mining machinery. He grasped that the third set was for the third dimension.

The main thing, he instinctively knew, was not to get too close to that ground! He found a button for altitude and punched it. Although the plane was staggering, the ground began to fall away.

This was too close to a win for Terl. "I’ll take over,” he said. “I got high honors as a pilot at the school. Watch me land on that cloud!”

A ragged top puff of cloud was ahead of them. Terl punched some buttons and stopped the plane on a flat place in the mist. “Trouble is, rat brain, you didn't watch what I was doing. You were too busy gawking at the scenery. But I guess if rats had been meant to fly, they'd be birds!” He laughed at his own joke, reached behind his seat, and unstrapped a sealed container of kerbango. He took a chomp on it and put it back. “First lesson. Don't ever leave anything adrift in a plane. It will fly around and bat your brains out. Not,” he added with more laughter, “that rats have brains!”

He took off and made Jonnie repeat the operation of landing and stopping. After the third attempt, Jonnie made it without being half down in the cloud.

Jonnie took off and started to fly toward the mountains. Terl instantly– and Jonnie thought a bit fearfully– batted his hands away from the copilot controls and with his own turned the plane back.

“Not while I’m with you,” growled Terl, his mood changed.

“Why not over the mountains?” asked Jonnie.

Terl scowled. “Whenever you fly over those mountains, just make very sure you got no breathe-gas loose anyplace. Understand?”

Jonnie understood. He suddenly understood a lot more than Terl thought he did.

“Why are you teaching me to fly?” asked Jonnie, more to distract Terl from his line of thinking than because he believed Terl would tell him. He was right.

“Any miner has to know how to fly,” said Terl. Jonnie knew that wasn't true. Ker could fly, he was sure, since Ker had said so. But Ker had also said other miners were only interested in going underground, not above it.

It was midafternoon when they landed the battle plane at the end of the row. Jonnie had been right. It was the twentieth plane. Terl inched it into precise position. He put on his breathe-mask, opened the door, and gave Jonnie a shove to get out.

“Don't get any ideas that you can start one of these things,” said Terl. “They require a special key to unlock the computers.” He dangled a key in front of Jonnie. “I keep the one to this plane right here beside the remote control box.” He took the box out and looked at it. “Yep, all switches still open.” He showed Jonnie the box. “And no dummy wires!” he laughed loudly. “That's pretty good. No dummy wires!”

Jonnie went off to round up his horses. Windsplitter had gone to Chrissie and the three horses were standing outside the wooden barrier.

Pattie yelped to see him. He realized they had been worried by the horse showing up without him.

“Got an antelope and a deer!” Jonnie called into the cage. “I was a little delayed looking for kinnikinnick. I found some, not very much, but it will flavor the meat.”

Chrissie was very pleased. “We can strip and smoke the meat,” she called across the two barriers. “There's plenty of ashes here and we can tan the hides.”

Jonnie felt better.

Pattie called, "Jonnie, there's a huge grizzly bear skin in here. Did you kill it, Jonnie?”

Yes, Jonnie had killed it. But he was not so sure that he hadn't killed the wrong beast!

Later that evening when Terl came to let him, supervised, into the cage, he gave the girls the skinned meat and hides to handle. He touched them reassuringly, hiding his wince at the way the collars chafed their throats.

When he came out and Terl had locked up and turned the juice back on, Terl said, "I’m just an animal attendant. But I don't wire dummy wires!”

He threw a stack of books at Jonnie before he rumbled away. “Get your rat brain around these, animal. Tonight. Ker will take up your instruction in the morning, so don't go chasing off on a rat hunt.”

Jonnie looked at the books. He was dimly getting an idea of what Terl must want out of him.

The books were: Beginner's Flight Manual and Teleportation in Relation to Manned and Drone Flight. The latter was clearly marked, Secret. Not for Alien Race Distribution. Could it be, thought Jonnie, that Terl was acting well outside the business of the company? If so, it was doubly certain he and the girls would be killed when they had served their purpose. Terl would not leave witnesses around.

Jonnie and Ker were engaged in ferrying mining machines and equipment to the “defense base.” The order to do so had come early that morning from Terl.

The machinery freighter plane was parked with doors agape and ramps let down in the open field near the battle planes.

A remarkably cowed Zzt checked off a drilling machine as it was run up the ramp by Ker. He raised the ramps and closed the doors.

Jonnie buckled himself into the copilot's seat and Ker slid behind the controls. The freighter lifted abruptly and spun to the west. Ker flew low and kept the ship steady, for none of the machinery was lashed.

Jonnie did not even look at the ground flowing by– they had made this short trip several times. He was tired. For a week he had been practicing flying all day and studying all night, and it was beginning to show.

His headache, however, came from the text Teleportation in Relation to Manned and Drone Fight. The flight part of it was far less interesting than teleportation. He felt that if he could grasp that, he might be able to do something to avert the fate he knew would come someday.

The mathematics of the text were quite beyond him. They were Psychlo mathematics a long way in advance of what he had studied. The symbols made his head spin.

The history section at the start of the book was perfunctory. It simply stated that a hundred thousand years ago a Psychlo physicist named En had untangled the riddle. Prior to this, it was thought that teleportation consisted of converting energy and matter to space and then reconverting it in another place so it would assume its natural form. But this had never been proven. En had apparently found that space could exist entirely independent of time, energy, or mass and that all these things were actually separate items. Only when combined did they make up a universe.