"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?"