"Holmer!" she cried frantically, dragging back. "He's dead, you heard—come on!" He pulled her, with rough determination. They banged out over the sagging porch-floor into darkness, and he ran, not toward the car but toward the brush beyond the house, the black thickets that promised protection. He looked over his shoulder and saw the leaping red glow spreading fast inside the grimy windows. The screams of the Irrian had sunk to a kind of groaning, and Birrel could hear Vannevan's fierce voice over it. He kept tight hold of Kara's wrist, and now they were in the thicket, moving through saplings and brush. Then Birrel stopped. Back there, three dark figures had come out of the house. Two of them were twined together, as though one half carried the other. The third was alone and in the lead. They stood silhouetted against the glowing windows, looking this way and that. Birrel whispered to Kara, "Quiet. If we try to get any farther, he'll hear us." "They will search until they find us," she whispered. He shook his head. "That house is beginning to burn nicely. I don't think they'll stay here long." He felt her gesture of negation. "I don't understand." "We have a thing on Earth called a Fire Department. In the country every man is his brother's fire warden. Pretty soon the place will be swarming with trucks and volunteer firemen. Stand still and wait." They waited. Vannevan and the men spoke together. Finally they left the hurt one to groan and crawl in the grass, and the two of them began to move back and forth in the brush, circling out. A great plume of flame shot up through some air-shaft in the house and stood out gloriously above the roof. Vannevan and his man had vanished now in the brush. Birrel held Kara's hand and sweated, and prayed for a sound. It came. The hoarse, harsh wailing of a country siren, designed to waken every sleeping volunteer in the township. It rose and fell on the night air, ominous and loud. Vannevan and his man hastily reappeared in the shaking red light. They picked up
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