CHAPTER IV

Birrel felt the imminence of onrushing danger. Danger, not just to himself, but to all his world. For in him lay the only chance to find out about the threat to Earth before it materialized.

Who their pursuers were, who the Irrians and Vannevan might be, and why they had come to Earth, he could not guess. But about Kara and Holmer, he was sure. Their colleague, the dead Rett, had had those pictures of Earth's most secret weapons and defenses on him. They, therefore, were the danger--and he must not lose them.

"Turn at the next side road!" he said to Holmer. "We can give them the slip in the back roads."

Holmer nodded. Birrel looked back. A pair of headlights swung steadily along a quarter-mile behind them.

"They're closer," said Kara.

Birrel looked ahead, saw the sign that marked a crossroad, and said, "Turn there!"

Next moment, he thought they were all three done for. For Holmer turned into the dark side road without slowing down at all, and the sedan careened on screaming tires and threatened to go over.

Birrel, slammed into a corner of the back seat, felt Kara bump against him. He held her with one arm and groped frantically for something to hold onto when they rolled over.

They didn't roll over. By scared reaction, Holmer spun the wheel at the right second. The sedan tottered, then thumped back onto all four wheels, its motor stalled.

Out on the main highway, a car flashed by fast.

"These cursed Earth vehicles!" said Holmer, in a shaky voice. "No gyroscopic controls, no built-in stability factor at all!"

Birrel felt like yelling, "What the devil made you think you could turn a right angle at full speed?" But he didn't. It would give him away, as Rett he mustn't know too much more about automobiles than the others did.

But for the sake of survival he had to get Holmer away from the wheel.

He said, "Let me drive it--since I saw you last I've learned to handle them pretty well."

Holmer crowded over in the front seat, holding the black box in his lap. Birrel climbed over fast, and took the wheel.

"They went past, but now they're coming back!" cried Kara. "I can hear--"

Birrel kicked the starter and then the gas-pedal, and the sedan shot up the dark asphalt country road like a frightened rabbit.

Kara was looking back, and her voice came clear over the rising whine of the motor.

"They're back there. Gaining on us--"

Birrel glanced up at the mirror and the headlights coming up fast behind. He jammed the gas-pedal down, sending the sedan hurtling past the lighted windows of houses, the black masses of trees. The headlights came no closer.

Kara cried to Holmer, "Use the--" Again, the word that Birrel did not know.

He knew what it meant. The square box in Holmer's lap, the thing that had stricken all in the prison unconscious by its potent vibrations.

Holmer fiddled with the box. Over the roar of the motor, Birrel could not hear it come on. But he looked up hopefully at the mirror.

The headlights stayed right with them.

"No use," said Holmer. "They've got their shields on. They must have known how we did it at the prison."

He turned the thing off. Birrel realized, with a certain desperation, that it was up to him.

He had one advantage, he thought. If those pursuing were from another world, they would not be able to drive an Earth automobile as expertly as he could.

Kara said, "They could cut us down with the"--(another totally incomprehensible word)--"but they won't dare use _that_ here! It would let everyone in this part of Earth know they're here!"

What weapon it was that the pursuers, the Irrians, had but might not dare to use, Birrel could not guess. But the fear in Kara's voice was enough to make him conjure up nightmare visions of awful agencies and powers that might be loosed on them.

It decided Birrel. Better to take the risk of cracking up than let that car hang onto them. He would use his one advantage.

"Hold tight," he said, and turned sharply at the next side road.

* * * * *

Birrel began a crazy twisting and turning on the network of back roads. He had always been a good driver. Tonight, with desperate purpose urging him, he forgot all about road-risks.

He forgot about everything except the ribbon of road under his headlights, the sharp curves that he skidded around in racing turns, the instinctive feel of what grade, what dip, what crossroads, came next. It was late and the farmhouses were dark now, sleeping people in them not dreaming of what screamed past them in the night, what flight and pursuit of folk from far worlds.

The rhythm of the racing motor got into Birrel's mind, as his tension rose higher. There was nothing but the headlights and the road and the dread of what came behind them. He was sharply startled when Kara's voice broke the spell, speaking close to his ear.

"We lost them, long ago!" she was saying. "Rett, slow this thing before you wreck us."

Birrel eased the gas-pedal. Beside him, Holmer looked scared.

"These clumsy Earth cars--I'll never get into one again!" he said, with feeling.

They were running up a hillside, with scrub woods on either side of the road.

"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. Birrel made out the dark loom of an unlighted farmhouse.

Was this "the house"? He dared not ask them that--as Rett, he might have forgotten the network of roads but he certainly wouldn't have forgotten this. But if he turned in, and it was the wrong place.

Birrel thought of a stratagem. As they approached the dark house, he slowed down as though to turn in. If they protested, he could explain that he only wanted to stop and listen again.

But they didn't protest, it must be the place. Birrel turned the car right into the rutted drive, with the headlights striking past an old lilac bush to the front of a ramshackle barn.

"Cut off the lights," said Holmer, worriedly. Birrel did so, his hand shaking a little. He couldn't gamble like this forever without slipping.

* * * * *

They went into the dark house, Kara first going through the rooms and pulling down the blinds, and then carefully lighting a kerosene lamp. They had, Birrel thought, picked a hideout far off the main roads indeed, to be without power.

The place was cold, musty, with some battered old furniture that looked as though it had been here for a long time. There was no evidence at all of how many people had been living here, and there was no evidence that its occupants were aliens from a far world. It was just an old house in the country, silent and lonely.

Birrel sat down and he was glad to do so, for his feeling of desperation was increasing. So far, he'd found out little. This house was obviously only a temporary headquarters. The real base of these people was somewhere else--but where? That was what he had to find out for Connor.

He gambled once more. He said, "Haven't any of the others been here with you?"

The others. The ones who had come with them to Earth, who _must_ have come with Kara and Holmer and Rett to Earth, and who must be found!

Holmer, setting down his square black box on the floor, said uneasily, "Thile was down last week. He's afraid of the ship being discovered, he kept urging us to leave. I told him we couldn't, without you."

Kara came and sat down in front of Birrel. She said, "I know you've been through a lot, Rett. But we have to decide fast. Have you enough proof of what Vannevan's doing on Earth to take home?"

And this was it, Birrel thought. He had got by in the rush of their flight, but he could not possibly bull it out in a conference where his ignorance must betray him.

Holmer said worriedly, "I say, go! Now that the Irrians know that Ruun has taken a hand in this, that we've followed them to Earth, they'll never rest until they hunt down us _and_ the ship. You know what Vannevan is like! I say, go with what we've found--right now."

"It all depends," the girl said quickly, "on what Rett has learned. Rett--"

She never finished. At that moment, quite without warning, something like an enormous hand struck Birrel and knocked him in perfect silence to the floor.

He did not lose consciousness. He was able to see the others fall too, stricken by that same silent power. Only he could see from their horrified eyes that they knew what the power was, while he did not. He tried with desperate urgency to move but every nerve was paralyzed, and he could only lie there and watch.

The door of the room opened. Two men came in, moving fast, dark ordinary men in ordinary clothes. Each one carried in his hand a thick, fluted metal cylinder. The cylinders must generate the paralyzing force which had worked effectively from outside the house, Birrel thought.

A third man followed them.

He was no taller than the others, but he was wider in the shoulders, a powerful easy-moving man. His face was the face of a man born to command, dedicated to it, living for and by it--a man to whom life without personal and immediate power over everything in sight would be intolerable. Just now he had it, and he was happy.

Holmer spoke, but his stiff lips could make only a terrible whisper.

"Irrians--_Vannevan!_"