"Hey," he said loudly; he began to walk up and down, searching, as if he might stumble over it, the benign entity, any moment, as if it might be fly-sized, a bug at his feet, something insignificant that he could only locate by almost stepping on it. But--he found nothing. And the silence went on.

A voice, magnified by a power-driven horn, boomed, "Go to Cheyenne."

He hopped, turned; behind one of the boulders the man lurked, speaking but concealing himself. Why?

"In Cheyenne," the booming voice said, "you'll find ex-tankers who came up previously. Not from your tank, of course. But they'll accept you. They'll show you the deep cellars where there's minimal radioactivity, where you'll be safe for a while until you can decide what you want to do."

"I want an artiforg," he said, doggedly, like some reflex machine; it was all he could think of. "Our chief mechanic--"

"I realize that," the booming, horn-amplified voice said. "But I still advise, _go to Cheyenne_. It'll take you hours of walking and this area is hot; you must not stay up here too long. Get down into the Cheyenne cellars!"

"And you can't tell me who you are?"

"Do you have to know?"

Nicholas said, "I don't 'have to know.' But I'd like to. It would mean a lot to me." He waited. "Please," he said.

After a pause of overt, genuine reluctance a figure stepped from behind a boulder--so close to him that he leaped; the mechanical reinforcement of the voice had been a technical deception to distract efforts to locate the origin of the sound--it had successfully given a totally false impression of great vastness and distance to both him and the latter of the two leadies. And all spurious.

The figure who stood there was--

Talbot Yancy.

Standing at the far end of the table Verne Lindblom said, "I think these are enough." He indicated the several weapons objects and then the neatly plastic-wrapped bones and skulls. Terran and nonterran; two distinct varieties, separate now, but soon to be mingled in the soil of Utah.

Joseph Adams was impressed. It had not taken Lindblom, the artisan, long. Even Stanton Brose, coasting up in his special wheeled chair, seemed surprised. And of course immensely pleased.

The other person present had no reaction; he was not permitted to: he loitered in the background. Adams wondered who he was and then he realized, with a jolt of aversion, that this was the Brose today who had infiltrated Runcible's staff; this was Robert Hig, who would find one or more--begin the process of turning up-these artifacts.

"My articles," Adams said, "aren't even in rough, yet. And here you have all the completed artifacts themselves." He had, in fact, merely begun page one of article one; it would be days before he finished the batch of three, turned them over to the Agency's shops to be printed up into their magazine form, combined with other, probably authentic, scientific articles of thirty years ago, in prewar issues of _Natural World_.

"Don't fret," the ancient sagging mass in the motor-driven chair which was Stanton Brose muttered at him. "We don't need to produce the issues of _Natural World_ until our legal staff hauls Runcible up before the Recon Dis-In Council, and that'll take time; do them as quickly as you can, but we can go ahead and have these objects buried--we don't need to wait on you, Adams." He added, gratuitously, "Thank god."

"Do you know," Lindblom said to Adams, "that we've established this: Footemen, employed by Runcible, have warned him--or will warn him shortly--that _something_ is being planned. Something roughly of this sort. But Foote's people won't really know what. Unless one of the four of us in this room is an agent for Webster Foote, and that's unlikely. After all, only we four know."

"One more," Brose corrected. "The girl who did the original drawings, especially the very authentic skull remains of the nonterrans. It required enormous anthropological and anatomical knowledge to make these specs; she had to know just what alterations from Homo sapiens to indicate... greater ridge bones over the eye sockets, undifferentiated molars, no incisors, less of a chin, but much greater frontal area of the skull so as to indicate a highly organized brain of far more than 1,500 c.c. capacity; in other words, a race more advanced evolutionwise than ours. And the same goes for those." He pointed to the leg bones. "No amateur could sit down and draw fibula and tibia like she did."

"And what about her?" Adams asked. "Would she leak any of this to Runcible or to Webster Foote's people?" As, he thought, I myself may well still do... as you, Verne Lindblom, know.

Brose said, "She's dead."

There was silence.

"I'm out of this," Lindblom said. He turned, started like a somnambulist toward the door.

Suddenly two Brose agents in shiny jackboots with their dainty cold faces materialized, blocking the door; god in heaven, where had they come from? Adams was appalled; they bad actually been in the room all this time, but, no doubt due to some technological piece of witchcraft they had been absolutely inconspicuous. Cammed, he realized; an old-time much-used espionage assist... chameleoned into the fabric of the room's walls.

Brose said, "No one killed her; she had a coronary. The pressure of work; she overtaxed herself, unfortunately, because of the deadline we gave her. Christ, she was valuable; look at the quality of her work." He jabbed a flabby, pudgy finger at the Xeroxed copy of the original scroll of specs.

Hesitating, Lindblom said, "I--"

"It's the truth," Brose said. "You can see the medical report. Arlene Davidson; her demesne is in New Jersey. You knew her."

"That's true," Lindblom said, finally, speaking to Adams. "It is a fact that Arlene had an enlarged heart and had been warned not to overtax herself. But they--" He glowered futilely at Brose. "They pushed her. They had to have their material by due date, on schedule." To Adams he said, "Like with us. I got mine done; I can work fast under pressure. How about you? Are you going to live through those three articles?"

Adams said, "I'll live through it." I don't have an enlarged heart, he said to himself; I didn't have rheumatic fever as a child, like Arlene. But if I had, they'd push me anyhow, as Verne said, as they did with Arlene, even if it killed me; just so long as I died _after_ I delivered the goods. He felt weak, powerless and sad. Our fakeproducing factory, he thought, demands a lot from us; _we may be the ruling elite, but we are not idle_. Even Brose himself needs to be tireless. And at his age.

"Why didn't Arlene get an artiforg heart?" Robert Hig spoke up, astonishing them all. His tone was diffident, but it remained a good question.

"No hearts left," Brose murmured, displeased that Hig had entered the conversation. And in such a way.

"I understood that at least two-" Hig went on, but Brose cut in harshly.

"None _available_," Brose amended.

In other words, Adams realized, they exist there in that subsurface warehouse in Colorado. But they're for you, you hulking, wheezing, dribbling, rotting old sack of fat; you need every artiforg heart there can be, to keep that carcass functioning. Too bad we can't duplicate the processes that sole licensed prewar manufacturer had developed

too bad we can't produce heart after heart here at the Agency's shops, or send an order by coax to one of the bigger ant tanks for them to put together a batch for us.

Oh hell, we could produce a heart, here, he thought. But--it'd be a simulated heart; it would look like the real thing, beat like it... but when you had it surgically installed it would turn out like everything we make turns out. And the patient wouldn't get much life out of _that_.