CHAPTER VI

They sat together in a brushy hollow by a stream. Frogs chorused in the marshy spots. The stars swung overhead, above the dark trees. Close by in the warm night an owl sang a weird fluttering song to his love, and there were crickets.

Birrel and Kara spoke of things so strange and far away that they were doubly unbelievable in this setting.

Birrel was stubborn. "I've got to take you back to Connor." He had explained to her who Connor was. "He'll study the facts and decide what to do. After all, you've got to remember that Earth is our world. It's more important to us than any other."

Kara was stubborn, too. "The threat is not against your Earth! It's against Ruun, my world. I told you--"

"But your man Rett, the real Rett--he had that probe-ray record of our most secret atomic installations on him."

"Of course he did," she said angrily. Birrel gathered that she had liked Rett, not romantically but as a good comrade in arms. She had taken the news of his death rather hard. "Why do you think he was there at all? He took that record from the Irrian. It was the proof we needed of the Irrians' activities here, so that our government back home will act before it's too late. If your people hadn't shot him, everything would have been arranged by now. As it is, it's worse than ever."

"Look," said Birrel. "I want to believe you, Kara. I do believe you. But it's just too big a responsibility for me to take on my own shoulders. Connor--"

"Connor!" she said contemptuously. "You're afraid."

"Yes," he said. "I'd be a fool if I wasn't."

She put her head between her hands and said in a very patient voice, "I am trying to remember your side of it. Now listen to me once again. There is a star--you call it Wolf 359. It has several planets, of which five are inhabited. We, the people of Ruun--"

"Control four of the five planets," Birrel said, not without a faint edge of skepticism for the story he had already heard from her.

"Peaceably," she said. "The other three worlds allied themselves with us voluntarily. They are completely autonomous. But they are less favorably situated than Ruun and they can't support large populations, so they're relatively weak. And they wanted a strong friend, rather than a strong master--like Ir. Would _you_ enjoy living under Vannevan?"

He had to admit he would not. "But are the Irrians all like him?"

"Of course not," said Kara. "But Ir, the fifth world, is ruled by oligarchs, of whom Vannevan is one. The people of Ir may not like it--indeed, we've heard some of them don't--but they're pretty well held down."

But still, Birrel thought, both parties to this interstellar quarrel were strangers to him. And anyway, the decision was not his to make.

He said so, and she said, "But it is yours to make. Nobody else can make it. There isn't time."

She plunged on desperately, trying to make him understand. "For centuries we've fought the Irrian oligarchs to keep them from dominating the whole system. The only time we had any peace was when the oligarchs took to fighting among themselves for power at home. Because of that struggle, many years ago they finally exhausted every bit of fissionable matter on Ir. We were able to prevent them from getting any more from our federated planets, and so for a long time there has been peace. You see? We had atomic weapons, they had not. They were no longer any danger. And of course we didn't need our strong military forces any more. All we've had for decades is just enough to act as an interplanetary police force. And now--"

"And now the Irrians have stolen a march on you," Birrel said. Kara had explained the significance of that probe-ray record, and he had to admit that it seemed to make sense. "They've decided to steal fissionable material from Earth. So they sent Vannevan and his men here to spy out our installations preparatory to raiding them. And if that doesn't constitute a threat to Earth I don't know what does."

"But the weapons they make won't be used against you!" she cried. "They'll be used against us, and unless we can mobilize in time we won't have a chance."

"Look," said Birrel. "Connor will see to it that our installations are so heavily guarded that no one can raid them. Then there's no threat to either of our worlds."

* * * * *

She groaned, as though in despair at trying to deal with an idiot. "Your prison was strong and carefully guarded. Did we have trouble breaking into it? Would we have trouble breaking in anywhere? Guards consist of men and electronic devices. We can blank them both, in many different ways. So can the Irrians. Your defenses wouldn't hold."

And Birrel realized with a sinking heart that that was true.

"But we've got to fight. We've got to do what we can."

"Yes. Of course you do. And there is only one way." Her voice was eager now, forceful, hammering home her points with relentless logic.

"Come back with us to Ruun. Tell the authorities what you know, what you have actually seen. That will be enough to make them believe and mobilize. Vannevan and his men are only the forerunners here. A small fleet must come from Ir for the actual raid. Ruun can stop them, you cannot. You understand? Your defense is out there!"

And she pointed at the glittering sky above the trees.

Birrel followed her gesture and thought, _Oh Lord, I can't! I'm scared. How far is Wolf 359? I never even heard of it._

And then he thought, _But she's right. Connor, all our armed forces--we'd be like babies against a fleet from Ir. We have atomic weapons but we'd never have the chance to use them. It would be just as it was at the prison--_

He listened to the owl and the crickets and the gurgle of running water, and smelled the cool sweetness of the summer night and dug his fingers into the grass because he wanted to hold on to Earth and all that was familiar.

But overhead the stars glittered and shone, and there was a decision to be made.

"If you want to fight for your world and your people," said Kara softly, "you must have courage to do what you know is right, even if it is against orders."

Yes, thought Birrel. Yes, indeed. Have courage.

Well, the whole thing had gone wrong from the start. He couldn't see that he would make it any better by delivering Kara to Connor. The chances were she couldn't be made to tell anyway where the ship from Ruun was hidden, and it would undoubtedly take off at the first hint of danger. And in 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 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 rays bent in a magnetic field around the ship," she said. "They'll drop it now. Watch."

She depressed a switch, activating some automatic signal system. The dazzle of sunlight vanished and the silver ship was there. She landed beside it.

She stepped out and waited for Birrel to follow. He hesitated, looking at the ship. A hatch opened and a magnetic grapple dropped down toward the hopper. Below, a much smaller hatch appeared and extruded a ladder. Once he climbed that ladder, Birrel knew, he was trapped. The ship would take off and--

"There's nothing to be afraid of," Kara said, smiling.

He set his jaw and went with her to the ladder and climbed it and passed into the ship.

It smelled like a submarine, of oil and metal and canned air. There was a man in an odd-looking coverall who stared at him and spoke to Kara. He heard Kara explaining, and in the meanwhile the lock door behind him was grinding shut and locking itself with relentless precision.

Kara said, "This is Thile. He commands the ship."

Birrel shook hands with him. He was a small lean man with very keen eyes and a hard competent jaw.

"So Holmer and Rett are both dead," he said, with grim regret. "Well, we'll make Vannevan pay for them. Help him strap in, Kara. We're taking off at once." He looked at Birrel. "If we can get back to Ruun without delay, you may be able to convince our sheeplike leaders in time. I hope so."

He hurried away somewhere forward--or up. Kara took Birrel into a small cabin where there were several padded couches, and helped him secure himself with broad webbing straps.

"Scared?"

"Not a bit."

"Liar. Don't worry about it. The first take-off is always the worst." She leaned over impulsively and kissed him, ludicrously like a mother tucking a fretful child into bed. The ship suddenly gave a great roar and a quiver, and a raucous horn began to sound. She scrambled into the couch next to his.

Birrel's heart pounded wildly and the blood in his veins turned cold and thin as water.

There was noise. A stunning, deafening crescendo of it. Then there was a feeling of motion. He lay on the top of a rising piston that pressed him slowly and relentlessly against air compressed into a smaller and smaller space. He opened his mouth and yelled in panic fear, seeing himself crushed into a flattened pulp. The cry was lost in the bursting roar that enveloped the ship. Ages passed. And then miraculously the pressure eased and finally was gone.

Thile's voice came suddenly from a speaker in the wall. "Trouble, Kara. Radar says another ship has taken off from Earth, right behind us."

Birrel heard her quick, fierce exclamation. "So Vannevan was watching his radar for our take-off. I knew he'd never let us get back to Ruun if he could help it!"