Turnbull nodded. "As I said, your letters got me worrying. I knew you must be on to something or you wouldn't have been so positive. So I started checking on all the data about the City--especially that which had come in just previous to the time you sent the letters. "I found that several new artifacts had been discovered in Sector Nine of the City--in the part they call the Bank Buildings. That struck a chord in my memory, so I looked back over the previous records. That Sector was supposed to have been cleaned out nearly ninety years ago. "The error I made was in thinking that you had been forcibly abducted somehow--that you had been forced to write that third letter. It certainly looked like it, since I couldn't see any reason for you to hide anything from me. "I didn't think you'd be in on anything as underhanded as this looked, so I assumed that you were acting against your will." Scholar Rawlings smiled. "But you thought I was capable of underhanded tactics? That's not very flattering, young man." Turnbull grinned. "I thought you were capable of kidnaping a man. Was I wrong?" Rawlings laughed heartily. "_Touche._ Go on." * * * * * "Since artifacts had been found in a part of the City from which they had previously been removed, I thought that Jim, here, had found a ... well, a cover-up. It looked as though some of the alien machines were being moved around in order to conceal the fact that someone was keeping something hidden. Like, for instance, a new weapon, or a device that would give a man more power than he should rightfully have." "Such as?" Duckworth asked. "Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a new and faster space drive. I wasn't sure, but it certainly looked like it might be something of that sort." Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. "A very good intuition, considering the fact that you had a bit of erroneous data." "Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation--or else you, personally--were concealing something from the rest of us and from the Advisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about it and that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked that way." "I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me--how does it look now?" Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came here for a purpose--to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything here on the level?" Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everything _human_," he said slowly. "That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor is eliminated--at least partially--from the data, the intuition comes through quite clearly. We're being fed information." Duckworth nodded silently. Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new material to the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that has to be refilled every so often."