Kara's people had been forced to lose a little time while they learned the language and customs of the part of Earth they had business in, well enough to get by. They had done this—as presumably the Irrians had too—by adapting their televisors to receive terrestrial broadcasts which they could pull in from amazing distances, and then staring at them for hours at a time with the help of a philologist and a social scientist. Then, when they came south after the Irrians, they had been able to slip quite easily into the polyglot life of New York, which is accustomed to accents and odd ways.
"There's the ship," said Kara suddenly.
She had brought the hopper down in an express-elevator plunge and was pointing at a wedge-shaped piece of barren land between two rocky arms at the base of a mountain. The light of the rising sun made a sort of dazzle in the air, but apart from that there was nothing.
"I don't see any ship," he said. "Where?"
"I forgot, you don't have the refraction-type camouflage. When you're used to it you can spot it without a scope, if you know where to look. Here." She made rapid adjustments in a small gadget like a camera view-finder. "This is tuned to our chosen vibration rate. Makes it harder for an enemy to find us."
Birrel looked into the 'scope and saw a slim silver spire standing on the flat land, its nose pointed toward the sky.
He looked out the port again and saw nothing.
"Light rays bent in a magnetic field around the ship," she said. "They'll drop it now. Watch."
She depressed a switch, activating some automatic signal system. The dazzle of sunlight vanished and the silver ship was there. She landed beside it.
She stepped out and waited for Birrel to follow. He hesitated, looking at the ship. A hatch opened and a magnetic grapple dropped down toward the hopper. Below, a much smaller hatch appeared and extruded a ladder. Once he climbed that ladder, Birrel knew, he was trapped. The ship would take off and—