"See, they get this chump a couple too many. So, comes morning, he's still in the street. Real tough swinging a parole, too. I'm in here since five years, remember? So I'm real careful where I get muscle any more." "Sounds interesting." Stan nodded thoughtfully. "Great Space and all the little Nebulae," he said to himself. "What kind of a planet is this? Nothing in the histories about this sort of thing." He walked over to the washstand. "Some day," he promised himself, "I'm going to get out of here. And when I do, I'll set up camp by Guard Headquarters. And I'll needle those big brains till they do something about this." There was, he remembered, one organization that should be able to do more than a little in a case like this. He smiled to himself ruefully as he thought of the almost legendary stories he had heard about the Federation's Special Corps for Investigation. As he remembered the stories, though, corpsmen seemed to appear from nowhere when there was serious trouble. No one ever seemed to call them in. No one even knew how to get in touch with them. He shrugged. The men of the Special Corps, he remembered, were reputed to be something in the superhuman line. For a large part of his life, he had dreamed of working with them, but he had been unable to find any way of so much as applying for membership in their select group. So, he'd done the next best thing. He'd gone into the Stellar Guard. And he'd lasted only a little more than three years. Somehow, he'd taken it from there. He was still a little hazy as to how he'd managed to land in prison on Kell's planet. It had been a mere stopover. There had been no trial. Obviously, they had searched his luggage at the hotel, but there had been no discussion. He'd simply been beamed into unconsciousness. After he'd gotten to Opertal, someone had told him the length of his sentence and they'd assigned him to the prison machine shop, to learn a useful trade and the duties of a citizen of Kellonia. He smiled wryly. They had taught him machinery. And they'd introduced him to their culture. The trade was good. The culture--? * * * * * His memory slid back, past the prison--past the years in Kendall Hall, and beyond. He was ten years old again. It was a sunny day in a park and Billy Darfield was holding forth. "Yeah," the boy was saying, "Dad told me about the time he met one of them. They look just like anyone else. Only, when things go wrong, there they are, just all at once. And when they tell you to do something, you've had it." He closed his eyes dreamily. "Oh, boy," he said happily, "how I'd love to be like that! Wouldn't it be fun to tell old Winant, 'go off some place and drown yourself'?" Stan smiled incredulously. "Aw, I've heard a lot about the Special Corps, too. They've just got a lot of authority, that's all. They can call in the whole Stellar Guard if they need 'em. Who's going to get wise with somebody that can do that?"