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She led them into the parlour, where the TV picture showed head and shoulders photographs of Paula and Burke, displayed side by side. The voice-over was saying: "... radar showed that, within a few minutes of its unexpected take-off, it fell back into the Earth's atmosphere and then burnt up before it reached the surface. The project director, Dr Frank Steinbeck, said that there might have been many more deaths had the unexplained take- off not occurred when most of the scientists on the project team were taking their lunch break. Dr Bruder was twenty-eight. She..."

They all listened in silence until the end of the report. Then the woman turned the TV off. "That was you, wasn't it?" she said. She turned to Stacy. "There were only supposed to be two people aboard, though." Apparently no-one had yet remembered Paula's temporary assistant; Stacy had kept in the background as much as possible for the few hours prior to the lunch break.

The woman went on: "How did you all survive, and finish up in Ireland of all places?"

1. Stacy told the whole story, keeping nothing back.
2. "We took off by accident, and then we got lucky and found out in the nick of time how the transporter worked," Paula said, feeling it would be wiser not to tell the true story.

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