Well, if you wanted to hide a spaceship, Birrel thought, that would be as good a place as any. But it was the devil of a long way off.
"How did you get down here?"
"By hopper."
"By what?"
"Hopper. A small flier for planetary hops. It's hidden right here in the woods. We made a shelter for it as soon as we got the farmhouse and flew it in by night. Before that it was in some mountains where we first landed. Come on."
And there was no problem. No problem at all. You found the camouflaged shelter in the summer woods and you got into the neat impossible craft that was in it and watched a girl in a tan suit manipulate a couple of controls with the casual ease of a teen-ager using a record-player. Some quiet force—compressed air, Birrel thought, remembering experimental aerodyne models he had seen—lifted the hopper high and took it away, and the last red coals of a smouldering farmhouse winked in the black countryside and were gone.
By dawn they were far north and rifling with incredible speed through the sky, at a fantastic altitude. Any radarman who chanced to catch them on his screen would lose them so fast he would never believe he had seen anything. And Birrel now knew a lot more about Kara and her people than he had.
Kara's father had been a high officer in Ruun's intelligence service in the days when, according to her, the existence of four peaceful planets hung on its efficiency. She herself, as a kind of proud inheritance, also belonged to the intelligence service, which in these later times had dwindled to a small and neglected group of people dedicated to not trusting the Irrians.
It was these intelligence people who had discovered the departure of the Irrian ship for Earth and deduced the reason for its going. But official Ruun had refused to be hustled into a panic. They were not going to put four planets on a full war footing, with all that implied, merely because a ship had made the voyage to another solar system. Rather, they thought, this star voyage might well be the beginning of a new era in peaceful expansion, with the Irrians finally taking a place in a civilized community of worlds. They had allowed a shipload of agents from Ruun to follow and check on the Irrians, but no more. And any future action would be determined by what documented information they brought back.