any case, it seemed that the Irrians were the threat to Earth, and she didn't know where their ship was. If Kara was telling the truth, the resultant delay might be fatal to both their causes. He thought she was telling the truth.

Very quickly, before he could change his mind, he said, "It seems I have to go with you to Ruun."

"Good," she said fiercely. "Good! Then we have a chance." She jumped to her feet and tugged at him impatiently. "We've wasted too much time already. Let's go."

"Now hold on," he said. "We'll make better time if we plan ahead. Where is your ship?"

"North. In a wild place beyond a big body of water—I think it's called the Hudson's Bay."

Well, if you wanted to hide a spaceship, Birrel thought, that would be as good a place as any. But it was the devil of a long way off.

"How did you get down here?"

"By hopper."

"By what?"

"Hopper. A small flier for planetary hops. It's hidden right here in the woods. We made a shelter for it as soon as we got the farmhouse and flew it in by night. Before that it was in some mountains where we first landed. Come on."

And there was no problem. No problem at all. You found the camouflaged shelter in the summer woods and you got into the neat impossible craft that was in it and watched a girl in a tan suit manipulate a couple of controls with the casual ease of a teen-ager using a record-player. Some quiet force—compressed air, Birrel thought, remembering experimental aerodyne models he had seen—lifted the hopper high and took it away, and the last red coals of a smouldering farmhouse winked in the black countryside and were gone.

By dawn they were far north and rifling with incredible speed through the sky, at a fantastic altitude. Any radarman who chanced to catch them on his screen would lose them so fast he would never believe he had seen anything. And Birrel now knew a lot more about Kara and her people than he had.

Kara's father had been a high officer in Ruun's intelligence service in the days when, according to her, the existence of four peaceful planets 

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