“So you are immigrating to our country, eh?” he said, examining passports and immigration forms.

“Yes, sir.” A lifetime in the RAF had taught Goldfarb the shortest answers were the best.

“Reason for leaving Great Britain?” Williams asked.

“Too many people getting too chummy with Himmler,” Goldfarb said dryly.

Whatever Williams had expected by way of reply, that wasn’t it. He was about Goldfarb’s age; he might well have seen action against the Germans himself. “Er, yes,” he said, and scribbled a note on the form in front of him. “So your claim would involve political liberties, then? We don’t often see that from the mother country.”

Naomi said, “You will see more of it, I think, as England comes closer to the Reich.”

“It could be so, ma’am,” the immigration officer said, and wrote another note. He turned back to David. “Now, then-what skills do you bring to Canada?”

“I’m just retired from the RAF,” Goldfarb answered. “I served since 1939, and I’ve been working with radars all that time. I’ll gladly pass along anything I happen to know that you don’t, and I’ll be looking for civilian work in electronics or at an airport.”

“I see.” Williams turned away and shuffled through some papers. He pulled one out, read it, and nodded. “I thought your name was familiar. You’re the fellow who was involved in that ginger-smuggling mess last year, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Goldfarb answered with a sinking feeling.

His old chum Jerome Jones had managed to clear away the obstacles to his emigration from Britain. What obstacles had Basil Roundbush and his pals managed to throw up against his immigration into Canada?

Williams tapped the eraser end of his pencil against his front teeth, “You and your family are to be permitted into the country,” he said, still eyeing that sheet of paper. “You are to be permitted entry, but you are also to be transported to Ottawa for a thorough interrogation. Until that interrogation is completed to the satisfaction of the authorities, you are to remain under the authority of the Canadian government.”

“What precisely does that mean?” Goldfarb asked. I should have known this wouldn’t be easy. Gevalt, Naomi knew it wouldn’t be easy.

“What it says, more or less,” the immigration officer answered. “You are not free to settle until this process is finalized.” He sounded every inch a bureaucrat.

Voice brittle, Naomi asked, “And how long is that likely to take?”

Williams spread his hands. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t the least idea. That’s not my bailiwick at all, I’m afraid.” Yes, he was a bureaucrat, all right.

“We’re prisoners, then,” David Goldfarb said.

“Not prisoners-not exactly, anyhow,” Williams answered.

“But not free, either.”

The immigration officer nodded. “No, not free.”

Glen Johnson peered out through the spacious glass canopy of his hot rod. That was the name that seemed to have stuck on the little auxiliary rockets the crew of the Lewis and Clark used to go exploring in the neighborhood of Ceres. He had radar and an instrument suite almost as complete as the one aboard Peregrine, but the Mark One eyeball was still his instrument of first choice.

Just for a moment, he glanced toward the shrunken sun. It showed only a tiny disk, barely a third the size it would have from Earth’s orbit. Lots of pieces of rock in the neighborhood looked bigger.

He watched the rocks and he watched the radar screen. At the moment, he was out ahead of Ceres, and moving away from it. Most of what he had to worry about was stuff he was approaching. He’d have to be more careful on the return trip, when he’d be swimming against the tide, so to speak. Hot rods were built to take it, but he didn’t want to put that to the test.

From the back seat, Lucy Vegetti said, “That dark one over to the left looks like it ought to be interesting. The one that looks like a squash, I mean.”

To Johnson, it looked like just another floating chunk of rock, with a long axis of perhaps a quarter of a mile. He shrugged. “You’re the mineralogist,” he said, and used the hot rod’s attitude jets to turn toward the little asteroid. “What do you hope we’ll find there?”

“Iron, with luck,” she answered.

He chuckled. “Here I am, alone with a pretty girl”-all the women on the Lewis and Clark looked good to him by now, even the sour assistant dietitian-“and all she wants to do is talk about rocks.”

“This is work,” Lucy said.

“Well, so it is.” Johnson glanced to the radar screen. He grunted in surprise, looked out the canopy, and grunted again. “What the devil?” he said.

“Is something wrong?” Lucy Vegetti asked.

“I dunno.” He looked down at the radar screen again. “The instruments are reporting something my eyes aren’t seeing.” He scratched his chin. “As far as I can tell, the set’s behaving the way it’s supposed to.”

“What’s that mean?” she asked.

“Either it’s misbehaving in a way I don’t know about, or else my eyes need rewiring,” he answered.

Lucy laughed, but he wasn’t kidding, or not very much. He didn’t like it when what his eyes saw didn’t match what the radar saw. If the instrument was wrong, it needed fixing. If it wasn’t wrong… He rubbed his eyes, not that that would do a whole lot of good.

“If you don’t mind, I’m going to try to find out what’s going on,” he said. “No offense, but your rock isn’t going anywhere.”

“Go ahead,” Lucy Vegetti said, though she had to know he’d asked her permission only as a matter of form.

Ever so cautiously, Johnson goosed the hot rod toward what the radar insisted was there but his eyes denied. And then, after a bit, they stopped denying it. “Will you look at that?” he said softly. “Will you just look at that? Something’s getting in the way of the stars.” He pointed to show Lucy what he meant.

She nodded. “So it is. I see it, now that you’ve shown it to me, but I didn’t before. What do you suppose it could be?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.” As Peregrine had back in Earth orbit, the hot rod mounted twin.50-caliber machine guns. He had teeth. He didn’t know if he’d need to use them, but knowing they were there helped reassure him. He slowed the hot rod’s acceleration-whatever this thing was, it didn’t seem to be under acceleration itself.

“No wonder we couldn’t see it before,” Lucy breathed as they got closer and the mystery object covered more and more of the sky. “It’s all painted flat black.”

“It sure is,” Johnson agreed. “And that’s a better flat black than anything we could turn out, which means…”

The mineralogist finished the sentence for him: “Which means the Lizards have sent something out to take a look at what we’re up to.”

When the hot rod got within a couple of hundred yards of the spacecraft, Johnson stopped its progress and peered through binoculars. From that range, he could see the sun sparkling off lenses here and there, and could also make out antennas aimed back toward Earth-much smaller and more compact than those the Lewis and Clark carried.

“What are you going to do about it?” Lucy asked.

Johnson’s first impulse was to cut loose with the machine guns the hot rod carried. He didn’t act on that impulse. Pulling a sour face, he answered, “I’m going to ask Brigadier General Healey what he wants me to do.” He didn’t like Healey, not even slightly. The commandant of the Lewis and Clark had hauled him aboard for the crime of excess curiosity, a crime that had just missed being a capital offense.

He had no trouble raising the Lewis and Clark; he would have been astonished and alarmed if he had. But convincing the radioman he really did need to talk to the commandant took a couple of minutes. At last, Healey said, “Go ahead, Johnson. What’s on your mind?”