Here Kathy's account was vague, but Nordenfeld could guess at the strangeness of a dead planet, to the child who barely remembered anything but the walls of an aseptic-environment room. Her father carried her to a little ship, said Kathy, and they talked a lot after the ship took off. He told her that he was taking her to a place where she could run about outdoors and play, but he had to go somewhere else. He did mysterious things which to Nordenfeld meant a most scrupulous decontamination of a small spaceship's interior and its airlock. Its outer surface would reach a temperature at which no organic material could remain uncooked. And finally, said Kathy, her father had opened a door and told her to step out and good-by, and she did, and the ship went away--her father still wearing his funny suit--and people came and asked her questions she did not understand. * * * * * Kathy's narrative fitted perfectly into the rumor Jensen said circulated among usually well-informed people on Altaira. They believed, said Jensen, that a small spaceship had appeared in the sky above Altaira's spaceport. It ignored all calls, landed swiftly, opened an airlock and let someone out, and plunged for the sky again. And the story said that radar telescopes immediately searched for and found the ship in space. They trailed it, calling vainly for it to identify itself, while it drove at top speed for Altaira's sun. It reached the sun and dived in. Nordenfeld reached the skipper on intercom vision-phone. Jensen had been called there to repeat his tale to the skipper. "I've talked to the child," said Nordenfeld grimly, "and I'm putting her into isolation quarters in the hospital compartment. She's from Kamerun. She was kept in an aseptic-environment room at some university or other. She says her father looked after her. I get an impression of a last-ditch fight by microbiologists against the chlorophage. They lost it. Apparently her father landed her on Altaira and dived into the sun. From her story, he took every possible precaution to keep her from contagion or carrying contagion with her to Altaira. Maybe he succeeded. There's no way to tell--yet." The skipper listened in silence. Jensen said thinly, "Then the story about the landing was true."