He saw Levine fall. The little man stared surprised at the cooked remnant of a leg. Holbrook made a grab for him. A gray face turned up. "No," said Levine. He cradled his rifle and thumbed it to full automatic. "No heroics, please. Get the hell back to camp. I'll hold 'em." He began to shoot. Grushenko snatched at Holbrook's wrist. Both men pounded down the farther hillside. The snarl of the Terrestrial rifle and the boom of the alien blast-guns followed them. Through the racket, for a second as he ran, Holbrook heard Levine's voice into the walky-talky mike: "Four of 'em left. A few more coming out of the spaceships. I see three in green clothes. The weapons seem ... oh, Sarah, help me, the pain ... packaged energy ... a super-dielectric maybe." CHAPTER II The officers of the _Rurik_ sat at a long rough table, under trees whose rustling was not quite like that of any trees on Earth. They looked toward Holbrook and Grushenko, and they listened. "So we got the jet aloft," finished Holbrook. "We, uh, took a long route home--didn't see any, uh, pursuit--" He swore at himself and sat down. "That's all, I guess." Captain Svenstrup stroked his red beard and said heavily: "Well, ladies and gentlemen. The problem is whether we hide out for a while in hopes of some lucky chance, or evacuate this system at once." "You forget that we might fight!" Ekaterina Ivanovna Saburov said it in a voice that rang. The blood leaped up in her wide, high-boned face; under her battered cap, Tau Ceti tinged the short wheaten hair with copper. "Fight?" Svenstrup skinned his teeth. "A hundred humans, one spaceship, against a whole planet?" The young woman rose to her feet. Even through the baggy green tunic and breeches of her uniform--she had clung to it after the mutiny, Red Star and all--she was big and supple. Holbrook's heart stumbled, rose again, and hurried through a dark emptiness. She clapped a hand to her pistol and said: "But they do not belong on this planet. They must be strangers too, as far from home as we. Shall we run just because their technology is a little ahead of ours? My nation never felt that was an excuse to surrender her own soil!" "No," mumbled Domingo Ximénez. "Instead you went on to plunder the soil of everyone else." "Quiet, there!" roared Svenstrup.