"Well, I thought of a better one," snapped Guthrie. In Skirkhi, he added, "Move your feet, worms, before we become a burning sacrifice!"
Shoving the natives ahead and towing a Karen whose voice showed signs of turning shrill, he got the group over the crest of the hill in plenty of time before the sky flared and thundered with the sudden roar of rockets.
The horrid noise departed toward the upper atmosphere. Presently, Guthrie's eyes readjusted to the dark until he could make out the trees through which they had groped and bumped heads an hour earlier.
"Might as well start," he said. "We might make it back in time for lunch."
"But the rocket!" wailed Karen. "After that awful trip to find it!"
"I set the controls," he explained, "to blast it up into an orbit around the planet, where it can broadcast our location until we're picked up."
"Oh," said Karen. "Well, I hope you can handle your friends till then."
"We should be able to see it in a little while. I set the controls to flop it over when it's high enough and send it around east to west."
"Why?"