"All right," he said sourly, hating her, hating the feeling of helplessness and disadvantage, raging at the combination of circumstances that had chosen him to grapple with a situation that no one man could possibly have handled. "Where are we going now?" "Back to where I found you. You'll have to get to Washington with the warning some other way." Wyatt groaned. "What do I have to do to make you understand? Nobody will believe a word I say." "It's your world," she said. "I can do no more than tell you what will happen." "You mean you _won't_ do any more," he said furiously. "What's your game, anyway? If you really cared whether Earth is attacked or not you'd make sure--" A pair of little blue lights began to flash alternately at the left of the control panel, accompanied by a shrill buzzing. Brinna started. She said something in her own language that sounded like a curse. "What's the matter?" Wyatt asked. "Trouble. Oh, not with the ship, that's only the communicator." She put out her hand and at the same time she gave him a hard glare. "Just keep quiet. Don't say anything at all, or you may only make things worse for yourself." She flipped a switch. The flashing and buzzing stopped and a man's face appeared in a tiny screen. Wyatt could not see it too clearly from his angle, but it seemed a not unlikeable face of which the chief characteristics were strength and a sort of inner weariness. The man spoke to Brinna and she answered him, and Wyatt could not understand a word of what they said. Some part of the conversation seemed to concern Wyatt himself. He became more and more frantically uneasy. When the contact was broken and the screen was blank again, he leaned forward against his bonds and demanded, "What's all that about?" Brinna nodded briefly toward the window. "Look out there." Her brows were drawn down into a black angry bar and she seemed to be thinking hard. Wyatt looked out the small window. * * * * * A second disc-shaped craft had joined them. It was about four hundred feet away, keeping pace. Even while he looked at it the craft tilted, showing a glowing pink center surrounded by the black outer ring, and appeared to shoot away into the starry void. Brinna followed it. Wyatt said, "Hey. You said you were going to put me off on the mesa--" She shook her head. "Not now. That's Makvern out there, the good gray Makvern who would be suspicious of his own father. He knows you're aboard. There is only one place I can take you." She pointed expressively. "Out. If I tried to drop back down to Earth now I'd be in front of a court-martial before breakfast." She turned to face him. It seemed that she had done her thinking, compensating for the sudden change in direction that Makvern's appearance had necessitated.