how do I get a distress call taped and set for broadcast...?"

When he scrambled down the ladder a little later, he brought a flashlight with him. Karen squinted and the three Skirkhi cringed in its beam.

"Polf, how long till day?" Guthrie demanded.

Polf found enough voice to guess that a third of the night remained.

Guthrie reached up and strained to unhook the ladder. As it came loose, he let it fall and said, "Let's get out of here before the jets light!"

"What are you doing?" protested the girl, grabbing his arm.

"Sending it up on automatic to broadcast a distress call."

"But I thought—"

"Well, I thought of a better one," snapped Guthrie. In Skirkhi, he added, "Move your feet, worms, before we become a burning sacrifice!"

Shoving the natives ahead and towing a Karen whose voice showed signs of turning shrill, he got the group over the crest of the hill in plenty of time before the sky flared and thundered with the sudden roar of rockets.

The horrid noise departed toward the upper atmosphere. Presently, Guthrie's eyes readjusted to the dark until he could make out the trees through which they had groped and bumped heads an hour earlier.

"Might as well start," he said. "We might make it back in time for lunch."

"But the rocket!" wailed Karen. "After that awful trip to find it!"

"I set the controls," he explained, "to blast it up into an orbit around the planet, where it can broadcast our location until we're picked up."

"Oh," said Karen. "Well, I hope you can handle your friends till then."

"We should be able to see it in a little while. I set the controls to flop it over when it's high enough and send it around east to west."

"Why?"

"So it will match the apparent motions of the moons."

Karen walked perhaps twenty steps in silence, then stopped dead.

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