"Space bat. It's a kind of giant bat. Nobody knows where they come from--somewhere out in space. One comes in every year or so. It feeds on what wild life it can find, then sails back out into the darkness. They kill off almost as many animals as your fur hunters--" And this last, he regretted as soon as he'd said it. The woman's eyes misted, strangely enough; her lower lip trembled. And Flint frowned, suddenly amazed, as he looked at her. Karen Vaun looked like an entirely different person. The office pallor was gone from her face; it was rouged with excitement. Her prim knot of hair had lost its pins and tumbled to her shoulders. Her whole body as she stood there, still breathing heavily, had taken on a slim vibrance that belied the memory of her former rigid dignity. The real miracle was her eyes--her glasses lay broken on the floor. Her eyes were soft blue, bright as a spring morning now. Flint shook his head in astonishment. "When you get back," he said, "take a look in a mirror and think things over. You've been wasting your time behind a desk." He turned back to the controls, and as he turned Greeno's plane appeared ahead and pulled up alongside. "Well, here's where you get a new pilot." He'd take Greeno's plane. Greeno could limp back in this one and rent another one to follow him up. Flint was so sure of his bat money he wasn't worrying about the cost of anything any more. He idled while Greeno's ship, skillfully, without a bump, hooked into the little clamps on the hull outside. A bell clanged--signal to unlock the port--and he got up, reached for the wheel on the safety door. But Karen--it was odd that he didn't seem to think of her as Miss Vaun any more--reached out and stopped his hand on the wheel. "Mr. Flint," she said softly, "take me with you--to hunt the bat." Flint stared at her, not believing her words. Hudson took her arm. "Now, Karen. You've had a very trying experience. You should--" She jerked away from him. "Please let me go, Mr. Flint. This means more to me than you know. I haven't forgotten what you said about my not being a real woman. You're right. I've been nothing but a walking adding machine and I--" "Look," Flint tried to put a stop to it, "if you'd let yourself go you'd be a pretty decent human being, mighty pretty without your glasses." He spun the wheel out of her grasp. "But I've got work to do now." "Please!" she cried. "If--" But she never finished that; she stepped back from the door quickly as the man in the space suit came in from the other ship--Greeno, taking no chances on future identification. Wrinkled like a prune, the uninflated suit covered his body completely; only his eyes were visible through their glass slit. "It's all off, Greeno," Flint said. "We ran across a bat on the way out! It's headed toward the Ring. Take these people back to Saturn and--" But the man in the space suit had whipped out his hand, caught Karen Vaun by the wrist.