"Stop on the crest, and we'll listen," said Kara.

He stopped, cutting the motor and lights. They got out and looked back. In the soft summer night, the little woods-sounds, the monotonous song of peepers, were somehow shocking in their ordinariness, to Birrel. Impossible that it was just another July night in New Jersey, when beside him stood a man and woman not of Earth.

He looked up at the summer sky, decked with chains and hives of stars. From which dot in the sky had these two come? From where had those others come, those who pursued, the Irrians? "The sky is full of worlds," Connor had said. And the sky was full of mystery and menace....

"Yes," said Holmer. "We've lost them. But we'd better not linger here."

They got back into the car, and Birrel drove on again. Holmer said, "We'll go back to the house. We've got to decide fast, what to do—now that Vannevan knows we're on Earth. We can stay here, and keep watching them. Or we can go home, with what we already know."

With a queer icy feeling, Birrel realized that "home" meant the world from which they had come somewhere across the abyss of space. There must be a ship, hidden somewhere, waiting for these people. If he could keep up his imposture till he reached that ship, and then get word to Connor.

"Rett, you're going wrong, the other road is the way to the house!" Kara said suddenly.

They had just passed a crossroads. Birrel braked the car, and with dismay realized that he had not the faintest notion where "the house" was. Yet that was something that, as Rett, he obviously should know.

He said, "I'm sorry, it's been so many weeks. You had better call out the turns for me."

Neither Kara nor Holmer seemed to find it surprising that he should not clearly remember. But as he drove on, with the girl warning him of each turn on these far-back-in country roads, Birrel wondered how long he could maintain this impossible imposture. He had never been supposed to maintain it for long, the plan had been that Connor and his agents would be following quick and close, but that plan had been irretrievably ruined and he had to ram ahead alone and do what he could, find out what he could.

He was driving down a dark, bumpy road between untilled fields when he became aware that now Holmer and the girl were both peering more intently ahead. 

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