"A pleasure," said the man on Syssoka. "I really didn't expect to contact you directly; my relative-time atlas must be a little old." "No, it's just that we never sleep, you know," quipped Smith, and signed off. He looked around, saw that it was Parrish who had entered, and added, "At least, it _looks_ as if we'll never sleep. I'm getting tired of it myself." "So is everybody except Joe, here," said Parrish. "A com man isn't normal anyway." "You gotta learn not to let all this stuff coming through bother you," said Rosenkrantz wisely. "If I soaked up all these crazy calls, I'd have nightmares every day. As it is, I'm as normal as anybody when I leave here." "You haven't been with us long enough," said Smith. "What else do you have there?" "There was a routine memo to make a check with the planet Greenhaven," said Rosenkrantz. "I cleared it when a good time came. The D.I.R. station there pretended not to know what I was talking about." "What?" yelped Smith. "Don't tell me we goofed on another one!" "I don't think so," said Rosenkrantz. "While you were talking to Syssoka, a spaceship named _Vulpecula_ called, said there was reason to believe the Greenhaven D.I.R. was locally monitored." "Tapped or the scrambler system broken," said Parrish. "What does this ship want to talk about?" "The Ringstad case." "Joe, godammit, who says you're normal?" demanded Smith. "I bet we've sprung another one! Two in one night--we're coming out with a good average after all. Get them on the screen before I pop my tanks!" Westervelt listened to the transmission from the spaceship. Without the help of a planetary relay at the far end, it tended to be a trifle weak and wavery, but the essentials came through. He left Smith and Parrish patting each other on the back and went back to tell the girls about it. They clustered around him in the main office, even Pauline leaving her cubicle for a moment and keeping one ear pointed at the switchboard inside. "You should have heard Smitty conning her out of writing us up for the news magazines," said Westervelt. "She seems to be pretty famous in her line." "What was she like?" asked Simonetta. "She looked blondish, but the color wasn't coming across too well. Not bad looking, in a breezy sort of way. The agent that sprung her had to skip too, because he thought the Greenhavens--they call them Greenies--had spotted his disguise." "Oh, boy!" breathed Pauline. "The cops must have been hot on their trail!" "Either that, or he wanted to go along with her for other reasons," said Westervelt. "They seemed kind of chummy." "Can they do that?" asked Beryl. "I mean, without orders, and all that?" Westervelt grinned.