"Back where?"
But Kunklin reached down and took him by the arm, and began leading him toward the ship. He explained, as painlessly as he could, the fact of Web's Galactic parentage. He did not say that it was Web's father—which, for biological reasons, it had to be—but only that some ancestor, somewhere along the line, had been extraterrestrial.
And while Web was downing that, and Prule was protesting, Kunklin spoke gaily on.
"You'll need time, my boy, won't you, before you come along with us? You'll need time, eh?"
"I have to see Dundon—"
"Of course, of course," Kunklin chuckled, "take all the time you want. Take weeks, take months. And in the meantime," he grinned toward Prule, in whom just now a great light was dawning—"in the meantime Prule and I will wander the byroads of your lovely planet. Eh, Prule? A vacation!"
And in a mood of genial lechery—for Earthman, Galactic, Faktor, this one thing is constant—the three men climbed into the ship, and then, the sky.
Ivy Jean Thompson, to complete the story in the coldest of truth, never set eyes on Web Hilton in her life. And if she had, it would have made little difference, for the fact of the matter is that Ivy Jean Thompson had had quite enough of men. Any kind of men. The disappearance of the Faktors had occurred, coincidentally, at the last possible moment for the saving of Ivy's virtue. It was, understandably, an unnerving experience.
She opened her eyes to find nobody there. She left the camp firmly convinced that there should never be anybody there. She retired to a small town in north Jersey where she became a particularly grouchy librarian spinster, the last of all the casualties in the case of the Blood Brother.