He went back into the main office room. Ah, hah! They had tried to jimmy the cabinets. There were the jimmy marks and one door slightly bent. But Terl knew you couldn't jimmy security cabinets open. He unlocked them all. Everything all in its same old place! Better and better.

He picked up the bug detector, inspected it. He turned it on. And right away a buzz! Lights flashing! Devils but this place was really bugged!

For a solid hour, Terl did nothing but remove bugs. Micro-microphones, button cameras, scanners. All in very hidden places, all focused to zero in on the key work areas.

Thirty-one of them. He had been tossing them, when found, onto his desk. He counted again.

Thirty-one. Oh, that animal had been busy! And stupid! Terl bet every other detector had been removed from the

compound.

Finally he put on a tunic. Somebody had stacked a whole crate of kerbango pans against the wall and he was eyeing it. He was about to indulge when he thought, “Just one more sweep,” and passed the bug detector around again. It whined!

For fifteen minutes he searched and searched. And then he found it. It was a micro set into the design of the top tunic button. He was wearing it.

Thirty-two. He checked out all his other clothes. No more. He thought he had better look into the ducts visually. They didn't register on the detector but who knew? But when he tried to steady himself on a chair by touching the duct frame it was wobbly. No more of that! He could let air into this place. Shoddy work. But what could one expect?

He surveyed the place again. He stood and laughed when he saw the components rack. Every assorted type of component, each with a big label above the box. And one of the button cameras he'd found hidden in a light fixture had been trained straight on it. Stupid animal!

Then he suddenly realized there must be a planted feeder unit to power these bugs and relay their coverage.

He put a mask on and got Lars. They went up and down the passageways. And there it was! A whole feeder unit, all wired up, right inside a recess closet for fire apparatus. He pulled it out and turned it off. Such a thing could run for half a year.

And recorders? It must have been relaying to recorders. Within a few hundred feet. He went back and got a mine radio, turned the feeder on, and very shortly ran down the recorder.

Just inside the garage door where anyone could pass in and out to change its discs without much observation. Stupid animal!

He turned the thing off and took it away. Who cared about any others? They were blind now that they had no bugs to feed or record.

Happily, he went back into his office, barred it, rechecked with his detector. Beautiful silence. No lights. Wonderful.

Privacy at last.

He put on some pants and boots. He opened up a pan of kerbango and sank back in his chair, luxuriating.

Home to wealth and power. That's where he was going now. And this time he would set such a trap that the animal would be gobbled up if he even came near it.

After nearly an hour, he thought he had better get to work.

But first things first. He had better calculate how much time he had to get this job done. And then start on the construction of a weapon so lethal and deadly that the company never used it except in the extreme emergency of planet destruction. After he fired, this place would be just a smudge in the sky.

He went to the cabinets and opened a false bottom.

Since his return to the African minesite, Jonnie had had trouble getting to sleep at night. He would roll and toss on the oversized Psychlo bed in the underground room he now used, uncomfortable in the overly hot and humid dark, going over and over again the steps and planning of recent past events, spotting where he had gone wrong in this and where he should have done something else in that. The life of a boy seemed far too much to pay for the information they had to have.

Sir Robert was not here. He remained in Scotland organizing a perimeter antiaircraft defense for Edinburgh. MacKendrick was not here. He had taken a trip home to see to the movement of his underground hospital to more suitable quarters now available and to check up on how his assistant there was getting along.

Colonel Ivan was in Russia.

Stormalong had been detained here, for they were afraid some revenge might be taken upon him for lending his clothes and identity to the recent enterprise. Finding himself at loose ends, the Norwegian had kept himself busy inventorying the “flying hardware”– a name he had gotten from somewhere or invented for planes.

Through Stormalong's efforts Jonnie had begun to divine the true character of his African base. Because it shipped very little bulk ore– they had roasted the tungsten down on the site– it had had none of the bulk ore carriers, a fact which made it necessary to truck out fuel and breathe-gas from the branch minesite in the Ituri Forest. But this African central did have a great many other types of planes which had led Stormalong to conclude that the base had also had a defense function. From some old Psychlo manuals they had found, it seemed that in event of attack upon the minesite near Denver, this African base had the function of launching a counterattack to take an enemy by surprise. And this is exactly what these Psychlos had been engaged upon when annihilated.

It greatly intrigued Stormalong to find several types of flying hardware he had never seen before and which weren't listed in current Psychlo manuals. They were not battlecraft as such, however. They were dual-purpose machines brought in to perform a specific task, and then, that task done– rather typical of company policy– they had simply been dollied to the back of the hangar and forgotten. Too costly or too much trouble to return them to Psychlo.

According to flight logs still with them they had been used to “mine out” an enormous amount of material which was found in orbit around this planet, a circumstance unusual in Psychlo experience. Some of the metals in these objects were priceless, being very scarce elsewhere, and the company had taken the unusual step of sending in some machines.

If properly gasketed in its doors, due to its teleportation motors which had no dependence upon air for lift, any common battle plane could fly to the moon and back without too much trouble. But they were not equipped to mine in space. You couldn't take objects in and out of a battle plane while flying in a vacuum. So some factory on Psychlo or on a planet controlled by the Psychlos had converted some very heavy duty, armored, marine attack planes. With atmosphere locks and remote control grapplers, they could fly alongside some object in space, seize on to it, and put it in the hold. Some scraps of such recovered objects were still in the holds of these things, bits which had broken off, like nameplates. One said “NASA” and Stormalong tried to look it up in planetary lists and couldn't find it. Therefore he had to conclude it had once been a local something.

Jonnie had looked at the old relics with some indifference. The gaskets on the doors were deteriorated– you can't expect a gasket to last for eleven hundred years and still be airtight, he pointed out. Every hinge and ball joint in their cranes and doors was too stiff to operate properly. There were even some spider nests in them and the spiders had dined, for countless generations, on another breed of insect that had dined upon the upholstery. The things were a mess. Jonnie had been more interested in another craft which mounted a blast cannon.

But Stormalong, having some idle and recently trained mechanics and three spare pilots on his hands and full shops available, had put these relics in operating condition. He had even painted a burning torch on either side of its nose which he said was a symbol of freedom. Stormalong had a lot of artistic style in him, Jonnie had to admit. But he privately hoped the symbol didn't forecast the thing going down in flames.