“Ah, bit we haed tae know noo, didn't we?” laughed Dunneldeen, unabashed.

They wanted to parade the pipers. But Robert the Fox would give no clue to the eyes of a watching enemy that tonight was any different. He sent them to bed.

Well, thought Jonnie, as he settled down in the wool plaid blanket, they had their uranium detector, perhaps.

But that didn't help Chrissie. No radio. No personal contact. How was he going to force Terl to come over?

A haggard, nervous Terl approached the rendezvous. He drove his armored ground car with one paw and held the other on the firing triggers of the fully charged heavy guns.

He had not figured out Jayed's presence on Earth. The Imperial Bureau of Investigation agent had been assigned to a lowly ore-sorting post by personnel; Terl had not dared

suggest any assignment. An ore sorter only worked when there was ore coming up at the end of shifts, and a fellow could disappear off the post for hours and not be missed and reappear as though he'd been there all the time. Terl dared not put surveillance equipment near him for Jayed was a past master at that, after decades in the I.B.I.

Terl had tried to get Jayed involved with Chirk, his secretary. He offered

Chirk wild promises if she could get Jayed into bed with her– with a button camera of the smallest size imbedded in a mole. But Jayed had paid no attention to her. He had just gone on shuffling about, head down, giving the exact appearance of an employee up to absolutely nothing. But what else? That was how the I.B.I. would work.

With shaking paws Terl had ransacked the dispatch boxes to home planet.

There was nothing from Jayed in them. No new types of reports, no strange alterations of routine paper. Terl had spent agonizing nights going through the traffic. He could find nothing.

Rumbling about, feeling like he was spinning, Terl had tried to figure out whether the I.B.I. had invented some new means of communication. The company and the imperial government did not invent things-they had not, to Terl's knowledge, for the last hundred thousand years. But still, there could always be something he didn't know about. Like writing on ore samples being shipped through. But it would take specially designated ore and there was no departure he could find.

The Imperial government was usually only interested in the company's ore volumes– the government got a percentage. But it could also intervene

in matters of serious crime or intended crime.

Terl could not find what Jayed was doing. And the appearance of a deadly secret agent on the base, with falsified papers, had not permitted Terl a single relaxed moment for the past two months.

He did his own work with a fury and an impeccable thoroughness quite foreign to him. He got through investigations at once. He answered all dispatches at once. Anything questionable in his files was buried or destroyed at once. Terl had even personally overhauled and fueled and charged the twenty battle planes in the field so that he would appear alert and efficient.

He had filed a banal report about the animals. There were dangerous posts in mining, slopes one could not get into, and as an experiment “ordered by Numph" he had rounded up a few animals to see whether they could run simpler machine types. The animals were not dangerous; they were actually stupid and slow to learn. It did not cost the company anything and it might increase their profits in case the experiment worked out. It was not very successful yet anyway. Nothing was taught the animals about metallurgy or warfare, both because of company policy and because they were too stupid. They ate rats, a vermin plentiful on this planet. He sent the report through with no priority. He was covered. He hoped.

But fifteen times a day Terl decided that he should wipe out the animals and return the machines to storage. And fifteen times a day he decided to go on with it just a little longer.

The sentry affair had disturbed him, not because Psychlos had been killed (he needed the dead bodies for his plans), but because one of the sentries, when Terl put the body in a coffin for transshipment next year, had had a criminal brand burned into the fur of his chest. This three-bar brand was put on criminals by the Imperial government. It represented someone “barred from justice procedures, barred from government assistance, and barred from employment.” It meant the personnel department on the home planet was careless. He had made an innocuous report of it.

For a flaming moment of hope he thought perhaps Jayed might be investigating that or looking for some such. But when he had a fellow employee mention it casually to Jayed, no interest had been shown.

Terl simply could not find out what Jayed was looking for, nor why Jayed was there. The tension and uncertainty of it had brought him near to perpetual hysteria.

And this morning, out of the blue, the animal had done something that literally stood Terl's fur on end with terror.

As was his usual practice, Terl was stripping the day's photos from the recon drone receiver, when he found himself looking at a photo of the minesite with a sign in it.

There, sharp and clear, at the lode, was the animal steadying a huge twelve-by-twelve-foot sign. It was resting on a flat place the animals had made back of the lode. In clearest Psychlo script it said:

URGENT

Meeting Vital. Same place. Same time.

That was bad enough! But a machine tarpaulin seemed to have fallen over the last part of the sign. There was another line. It said:

The W....

Terl couldn't read the rest of it.

The stupid animal apparently had not noticed part of its sign was obscured.

With shaking claws, Terl had tried to find another frame in the sequence that looked back of the tarpaulin. He could not.

Panic gripped him.

Gradually his scattered wits collected down to seething anger. The panic died out as he realized that his was the only recon drone receiver on the planet; the telltale on the side of it that showed whether anything else was receiving was mute. He daily watched these photos and had exactly tracked the progress at the lode. The animal he had captured always seemed to be there with a crew. While all these animals looked alike, he thought he could recognize the blond beard and size of the one he had trained. This usually reassured him, for it seemed to mean the animal was busy and not wandering around elsewhere.

The progress at the lode was minimal but he knew the problems of mining it, and he also knew they might solve them without his advice. He had months to go– four months more, actually– before day 92.

He got over his panic and shredded the photos. Jayed had no possible access to them.

But to directly link Terl with the project was not to be allowed. He began to imagine that the sign had started with his name and regretted having shredded it so fast. He should have made sure. Maybe it did start:

"Terl!"

Terl was not introspective enough to realize that he was bordering upon insanity.

The darkness spread like a black sack over the tank. He had been driving on instruments without lights. It was treacherous terrain: an old city had been here once, but it was now just a honeycomb of abandoned mine holes where the company had followed an old deposit centuries before.

Something showed on his detector screen right ahead. Something live!

His paw rested alertly on the firing knob, ready to blast. He cautiously made sure he was headed away from the compound and masked by a hill and ancient walls. Then he turned on a dim inspection light.

The animal was sitting on a horse at the rendezvous point. It was a different horse, a wild horse nervous because of the tank. The dim, green tank light bathed the rider. There was another, someone else! No, it was just another horse...it had a large pack on its back.