Farradyne did not deem it wise to sit this out. They might have been heading for the other side of the field, but if they weren't he was trapped. He went aloft to the salon and scuttered down the landing ramp, around the back side of the poised spacer and away from the direction of the trucks, running in the shadow cast by the Lancaster. Five or six hundred yards away was another spacer, and it was completely dark. Farradyne scurried around the widespread tail fins of the monster and stood there, peering at the caravan from between the angle made by the tail fin and the in-curving body of the spacecraft.
The trucks came around the Lancaster, surrounded it in a circle, and then a blaze of lights came, lighting the Terran ship from dome to reaction funnel. Ladders were sent aloft and a huge crane lifted. The calls of workers and the directions of their superintendent came to Farradyne clearly. He wondered what they were doing and saying; except for the three-toned voices that added an audible complement of women and children to the gang, it sounded like any work party on earth yammering in a strange tongue.
He watched for an hour, and then he saw that the distant sky was beginning to show a very faint glow of gray. Sunrise—or perhaps a false sunrise, he could not tell.
He scuttled like a human spider away from the direction of the work party until its flood lights were a distant miniature stage setting. He wound in and among silent, dark spacecraft, avoiding those with lights even though he had to detour wide for the sake of this safety. Eventually he came to the far side of the spaceport.
He cased the place warily from behind the fin of a spacer, looking at the dark, silent buildings and wondering if this gang of aliens had ever heard of night watchmen. He did not trust the quiet darkness of the apparently uninhabited spaceport because he was suspicious and he knew that other people were as suspicious as he was. He was glad that he did not barge in brashly, for along about the first glimmers of real graying sky, a man came out from between two of the buildings waving a searchlight. He sauntered along in front of the nearest building and disappeared between it and the next.
Farradyne skipped across the space and went into the gangway the watchman had just come out of. He walked warily through and came to a high wire fence. Keeping to the building side of the clearance-way between fence and building, Farradyne skulked along in the direction opposite to that taken by the watchman.
He needed a minimum of two items: A set of Planet X clothing and a way out of this rattrap.
He found the way out a few minutes later.
A dim striking of a bell alarmed him until he realized that it was tolling, rather than clamoring an alarm. He followed the tolling for seventeen bongs and came upon a small sentry house perched beside an open gate. As the tolling stopped, the man in the house stretched, yawned and got up, picking up a searchlight. He stepped outside and looked around in a bored manner.
The watchman took one look at the open gate some ten feet from his position and shrugged. He turned his back on it and disappeared between a couple of buildings not far from Farradyne's place.