lay out her
innocence and unconcern. Then it was Bat who decided the issue.

He leaped from the bed and escorted something to the door, remaining a
careful distance behind. Then he mewed loudly twice. Steena followed him
and opened the door wider.

Bat went straight on down the corridor, as intent as a hound on the
warmest of scents. Steena strolled behind him, holding her pace to the
unhurried gait of an explorer. What sped before them both was invisible
to her but Bat was never baffled by it.

They must have gone into the control cabin almost on the heels of the
unseen--if the unseen had heels, which there was good reason to
doubt--for Bat crouched just within the doorway and refused to move on.
Steena looked down the length of the instrument panels and officers'
station-seats to where Cliff Moran worked. On the heavy carpet her boots
made no sound and he did not glance up but sat humming through set teeth
as he tested the tardy and reluctant responses to buttons which had not
been pushed in years.

To human eyes they were alone in the cabin. But Bat still followed a
moving something with his gaze. And it was something which he had at
last made up his mind to distrust and dislike. For now he took a step or
two forward and spat--his loathing made plain by every raised hair along
his spine. And in that same moment Steena saw a flicker--a flicker of
vague outline against Cliff's hunched shoulders as if the invisible one
had crossed the space between them.

But why had it been revealed against Cliff and not against the back of
one of the seats or against the panels, the walls of the corridor or the
cover of the bed where it had reclined and played with its loot? What
could Bat see?

The storehouse memory that had served Steena so well through the years
clicked open a half-forgotten door. With one swift motion she tore loose
her spaceall and flung the baggy garment across the back of the nearest
seat.

Bat was snarling now, emitting the throaty rising cry that was his
hunting song. But he was edging back, back toward Steena's feet,
shrinking from something he could not fight but which he faced
defiantly. If he could draw it after him, past that dangling
spaceall.... He had to--it was their only chance.

"What the...." Cliff had come out of his seat and was staring at them.

What he saw must have been weird enough. Steena, bare-armed and
shouldered, her usually stiffly-netted hair falling wildly down her
back, S