Seven times during the next few days, the HC-36 approached a star and listened for electromagnetic disturbances in space. Seven times, they got nothing but normal static. Then came Therbis. Someone once defined eternity as the time required for everything to happen once. If you toss a coin enough times, it will eventually land on edge; if you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, they will eventually deal out in any predetermined order. And, by the inherently unprovable laws of probabilities, if you watch a glass of water long enough, all the high-velocity molecules will congregate in one place and boil off, leaving the remainder of the water frozen solid. You may have to wait some ten to the twentieth years, or it may happen tomorrow. But, however improbable, each of them _can_ happen. Take a spaceship. In order for one spaceship to spot another, via radar, they must be within a million or so miles of each other and have low velocities relative to each other. An Earth vessel might never see another Earth vessel in space unless they had arranged it beforehand. And arranging things beforehand is stacking the deck, a reversal of normal entropy that only intelligent beings can bring about. The Thirty-six approached the Therbis sun at something less than a thousand miles per second, the actual difference in velocity between that sun and Sol. Therbis itself was the fourth planet of the system; cold and bleak. It was somewhat bigger than Terra, with plenty of water and a high percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so the greenhouse effect kept it warm enough for human beings to colonize the island chains that surrounded the equatorial belt. The HC-36 was braking in when the odds-against coincidence happened. Near planet six, which just happened to be at its nearest approach to Therbis, a spaceship came into range of the instruments of the HC-36. At first it was thought to be a meteor; that was what the instruments were meant to look for, and that's what they expected. But no meteor is a smooth prolate spheroid, like a football with smoothly rounded ends. And no Earth ship was ever shaped like that, either. It was visible on the plates of the HC-36 only a few seconds--then it vanished. Orders were already snapping over the robot control system as Parmay charged for the main salon. He had heard the alarm and came running. Tallen was slapping his hands over switch plates with lightning movements of his wrists. "Alien ship!" he shouted. "As soon as our radar touched her, she hit hypersee. That was about thirty-five seconds before our own equipment registered the echo, so she's had better than a minute to arrange herself nicely to blast us!" "Won't she have to come out of hypersee to do it?" "Sure, but where?" "I'd--" He was cut off by a hum of power from Fire Control; at the same instant, he saw the football shape of the alien on the screen. It was less than eight miles away.