hung on its efficiency. She herself, as a kind of proud inheritance, also belonged to the intelligence service, which in these later times had dwindled to a small and neglected group of people dedicated to not trusting the Irrians.

It was these intelligence people who had discovered the departure of the Irrian ship for Earth and deduced the reason for its going. But official Ruun had refused to be hustled into a panic. They were not going to put four planets on a full war footing, with all that implied, merely because a ship had made the voyage to another solar system. Rather, they thought, this star voyage might well be the beginning of a new era in peaceful expansion, with the Irrians finally taking a place in a civilized community of worlds. They had allowed a shipload of agents from Ruun to follow and check on the Irrians, but no more. And any future action would be determined by what documented information they brought back.

Kara's people had been forced to lose a little time while they learned the language and customs of the part of Earth they had business in, well enough to get by. They had done this—as presumably the Irrians had too—by adapting their televisors to receive terrestrial broadcasts which they could pull in from amazing distances, and then staring at them for hours at a time with the help of a philologist and a social scientist. Then, when they came south after the Irrians, they had been able to slip quite easily into the polyglot life of New York, which is accustomed to accents and odd ways.

"There's the ship," said Kara suddenly.

She had brought the hopper down in an express-elevator plunge and was pointing at a wedge-shaped piece of barren land between two rocky arms at the base of a mountain. The light of the rising sun made a sort of dazzle in the air, but apart from that there was nothing.

"I don't see any ship," he said. "Where?"

"I forgot, you don't have the refraction-type camouflage. When you're used to it you can spot it without a scope, if you know where to look. Here." She made rapid adjustments in a small gadget like a camera view-finder. "This is tuned to our chosen vibration rate. Makes it harder for an enemy to find us."

Birrel looked into the 'scope and saw a slim silver spire standing on the flat land, its nose pointed toward the sky.

He looked out the port again and saw nothing.

"Light 

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