They banged out over the sagging porch-floor into darkness, and he ran, not toward the car but toward the brush beyond the house, the black thickets that promised protection. He looked over his shoulder and saw the leaping red glow spreading fast inside the grimy windows. The screams of the Irrian had sunk to a kind of groaning, and Birrel could hear Vannevan's fierce voice over it. He kept tight hold of Kara's wrist, and now they were in the thicket, moving through saplings and brush. Then Birrel stopped. Back there, three dark figures had come out of the house. Two of them were twined together, as though one half carried the other. The third was alone and in the lead. They stood silhouetted against the glowing windows, looking this way and that. Birrel whispered to Kara, "Quiet. If we try to get any farther, he'll hear us." "They will search until they find us," she whispered. He shook his head. "That house is beginning to burn nicely. I don't think they'll stay here long." He felt her gesture of negation. "I don't understand." "We have a thing on Earth called a Fire Department. In the country every man is his brother's fire warden. Pretty soon the place will be swarming with trucks and volunteer firemen. Stand still and wait." They waited. Vannevan and the men spoke together. Finally they left the hurt one to groan and crawl in the grass, and the two of them began to move back and forth in the brush, circling out. A great plume of flame shot up through some air-shaft in the house and stood out gloriously above the roof. Vannevan and his man had vanished now in the brush. Birrel held Kara's hand and sweated, and prayed for a sound. It came. The hoarse, harsh wailing of a country siren, designed to waken every sleeping volunteer in the township. It rose and fell on the night air, ominous and loud. Vannevan and his man hastily reappeared in the shaking red light. They picked up the hurt man and took him limping away between them. They went down the dark road. Presently, in the distance, Birrel heard a car start. When he could not hear it any more he said, "All right, let's go." And he took Kara away across the dark brushy fields running, stumbling, toward a future whose incredible outlines he was beginning vaguely and against his will to see. CHAPTER VI They sat together in a brushy hollow by a stream. Frogs chorused in the marshy spots. The stars swung overhead, above the dark trees. Close by in the warm night an owl sang a weird fluttering song to his love, and there were crickets. Birrel and Kara spoke of things so strange and far away that they were doubly unbelievable in this setting. Birrel was stubborn. "I've got to take you back to Connor." He had explained to her who Connor was. "He'll study the facts and decide what to do. After all, you've got to remember that Earth is our world. It's more important to us than any other."