She said impatiently, "It does not matter who I am, except that I'm in a position to know what I'm saying. Listen. There is a huge interstellar task force out there, working its way through this sector of the galaxy, plundering as it goes. These fringe areas are too far away from our center of power at Uryx--a star-system you never heard of here--to make permanent conquest practical, so all we are interested in is loot. Our advance scouts go far ahead of the main body. We scouts have been here before. _I've_ been here before. Now I'm warning you. The main force will be at Alpha Centauri when I return to it. When it is finished there, Earth is next." "I don't believe you," Wyatt said. But in spite of himself, he did. He was close to the foot of the stair now, close enough almost to touch the tall, slim girl with the black hair blowing around her forehead and the brilliant, wary eyes. The strange ship loomed above them both. Wyatt looked at it and shivered and gnawed his lip. "Why are you warning me?" he said suddenly. "You're part of the force. Why do you want to betray it?" "I have my reasons," she said, "and they are good ones. But you wouldn't understand them. In any case, the warning is true. Don't question it." She started to withdraw from him, up the metal steps. "Wait," said Wyatt. "Nobody on earth would listen to me if I told them that story. They'd only think I was crazy. Listen, if you really want to have your warning taken seriously you'll have to go to Washington yourself." "That's impossible," she said curtly. Again she started up the steps and again he stopped her. "No," he said, and now he knew that he must not let her get away. As wildly improbable, not to say insane, as this whole business was, she was real and her ship was real, and wiser men than he should be handed the responsibility of dealing with that reality. "You and I together couldn't convince anybody by just talking," he said. "The only thing that could is your ship. _That_ was never made on Earth and they would know that. They could test it, examine it, prove it isn't a fake, a hoax of any kind, and that's going to be hard--you haven't any idea how hard." * * * * * He stepped onto the lowest step of the stair. "You've got to fly this thing to Washington." "I told you that's impossible," she said. "I've given you the warning; you'll have to do what you can with it. Stand clear!" She turned her back on him and sprang lightly through the aperture into the ship. Wyatt did not stop to think. He rushed up the stair after her and it began to draw itself up as he did so, folding him under, so that he thought he was going to have to jump clear or be crushed. There was a whine of power from inside. Damn her, thought Wyatt, she doesn't care if she kills me. He scrambled frantically up the tilting, flattening rungs and caught the edge of the aperture and kicked himself forward through it.