id furiously, "--if they were faking it, they wouldn't try tricks!
They'd make war! They'd try conquest!"

Coburn saw the stout Greek general nodding to himself. But the Skipper
said suavely: "You were with one of the creatures, you say, up in the
village of Naousa. Would you say he seemed unfriendly to the
Bulgarians?"

"He was playing the part of an Englishman," snapped Coburn, "trying to
stop a raid, and murders, and possibly a war--all of them unnecessary!"

"You don't paint a frightening picture," complained the skipper
ironically. "First you say we have to fight him and his kind, and then
you imply that he was highly altruistic. What is the fact?"

"Dammit!" said Coburn. "I hated him because he wasn't human. It made my
flesh crawl to see him act so much like a man when he wasn't. But he
made me feel ashamed when I held a gun on him and he proved he wasn't
human just so Janice--so Miss Ames wouldn't be afraid to drive down to
Salonika with me!"

"So you have some ... friendly feelings toward him, eh?" the skipper
said negligently. "How will you get in touch with his kind, by the way?
_If_ we should ask you to? Of course you've got it all arranged? Just in
case."

Coburn knew that absolutely nothing could be done with a man who was
trying to show off his shrewdness to his listening superiors. He said
disgustedly: "That's the last straw. Go to hell!"

A loud-speaker spoke suddenly. Its tone was authoritative, and there
were little cracklings of static in it from its passage across the
Atlantic.

"That line of questioning can be dropped, Captain. Mr. Coburn, did these
aliens have any other chances to kill you?"

"Plenty!" snapped Coburn. "And easy ones. One of them came into my
office as my secretary. She could have killed me. The man who passed for
Major Pangalos could have shot us all while we were unconscious. I don't
know why they didn't get the transport plane, and I don't know what
their scheme is. I'm telling the facts. They're contradictory. I can't
help that. All I have are the facts."

The loud-speaker said crisply: "The attack on the transport plane--any
pilots present who were in that fight?"

Someone at the back said: "Yes, sir. Here."

"How good was their ship? Could it have been a guided missile?"

"No, sir. No guided missile. Whoever drove that ship was right on board.
And that ship was good. It could climb as fast as we could dive, and no
human could have taken the accelerations and th