John Andrew turned to Dor. “Well, I should thank you for bringing him back, I guess,” he muttered. “But now that you’re with us again” —he shot out a big paw and grabbed her by the wrist—“ how about explaining some of this?”
He was very gentle with the wrist. He didn’t want to hurt her; he was wondering already, in fact, what had made him get so rough at all. But she didn’t seem to mind.
“I’ve got to go quickly,” she told him. “I think Garf will be all right now, but he may take a notion to come back. And I have to see that the gate is closed before....”
“What gate? Get back where?” Farmer managed to put more curiosity than impatience into his tone.
“Back to my own planet—Tamdivar, sun Nogore, member of the Galactic Federation,” she said patiently. “The gate is a matter-transmitter between my world and yours. It was once in constant use, but my government closed it when you people got to the point where you were running around in submarines, using depth bombs, and just noticing our aircraft too much.”
Somehow, what popped into Farmer’s head was the chorus of an old song he had sung in boy’s camp when very young. “There’s a hole in the bottom of the sea! There’s a log in the hole....”
“Your machine reactivated the gate from this side, even if that isn’t what you designed it to do,” Dor went on. “It’s a good thing I noticed the gate was open. Of course, the area affected isn’t large—it includes those steps and a lot of water around them.
“The gate’ll stay open now until it’s closed from our side—but I’ll have to take your outfit back and destroy it, anyway. Our cops would be tough with you if they found you operating the thing, and Federation Securitymen would be even tougher. Take it as a warning: don’t do it again.”
She turned to go, but Farmer held on. “What’s this about a Galactic Federation? And if they’ve banned all communication with Earth, why haven’t they just blasted the planet out of existence and gotten rid of it? Of course, I know we’re thoroughly uncivilized and too warlike for any other race to trust, and all that. I can see how Earth might be considered the plague spot of the universe....”