Five minutes later, subjective time, the _Enterprise_ landed with a
lurch.
That they had reached a world in hyper-space there could be no doubt.
But outside the portholes of the little freighter was only the murky
grayness of the timeless hyper-space continuum.
* * * * *
"They've gone down, sir!" Ramar Chind cried.
Garr Symm nodded. For the first time he was really nervous. He wondered
about the Dennison letter. Could his fear be attributed to ancestral
memory, as Dennison had indicated? Was it really baseless--this
crawling, cold-fingered hand of fear on his spine?
There was no physical barrier. The _Enterprise_ had established that
fact. Then was there a barrier which Garr Symm, along with all
humanoids, had somehow inherited?
A barrier of stark terror, subjective and unfounded on fact?
And beyond it--what?
Power to chain the universe....
Think, Garr Symm told himself. You've got to be rational. You're a
scientist. You've been trained as a scientist. This is their barrier,
erected against you, against all humanoids, a million years ago. It
isn't real. It's all in your mind.
"Do you want me to follow them down?" Ramar Chind asked.
Garr Symm envied the policeman. Naturally, Ramar Chind did not share his
terror. You didn't know the terror until you learned about proto-man;
then the response seemed to be triggered in your brain, as if it had
been passed to you through the genes of your ancestors, waiting a
million years for release....
Fear, a guardian.
Of what? Garr Symm asked himself. Think of that, fool. Think of what it
guards.