"I'm going to my office to make a report on the sloppy way this reporting has been done. There's going to be fur flying over these skips and jumps, and I don't want it to be our fur. Best thing is to make the complaint first," he said to the room at large. "Now you call me if there's any more of this bollix," he said to the operator as he left. An hour passed while the supervisor sat in his office. He wrote furiously, scratched out, wrote some more, tore up papers and threw them in the vague direction of the wastebasket, started afresh to write some more. How to report without stepping on anybody's toes? His buzzer sounded softly to give him respite, and he looked up from a virtually blank piece of paper to the board. The Eden operator again. "Oh, no," he groaned. But he left his desk at once and half trotted up the aisle. "Now the captain of the ship says he wants Sector Chief Hayes at once," the operator called out. "Something very important." "Very well," the supervisor said. "Ring him." But Hayes didn't wait for the ring. He had been listening, red-eyed, tired, gaunt for lack of sleep. "Give me connection," he said to the operator as soon as the line opened. "Bill Hayes here, Captain," he said, as soon as he received the signal. "What now?" "Mrs. Gray, the Junior E's wife, has disappeared from aboard ship," the Captain said without any preliminaries. "What do you mean 'disappeared'?" Hayes asked. "How could she disappear in deep space? Have you looked everywhere? Checked the lifeboats? Maybe she took one and tried to get down to her husband by herself." "We've looked everywhere. No lifeboats missing. No port has opened. You ought to know we wouldn't bother you until we'd checked everything out first." "She can't have disappeared into thin air, thin space," Hayes quarreled back. "She must be on your ship somewhere. When was she last seen?" "That's--ah--that's mainly why I'm calling you, Bill," the captain said. "A wild tale, obviously a mistake. One of the crewmen passed her stateroom about an hour ago. Door was open and he looked in, the way anybody does. Says he saw her standing inside her cabin embracing a man. Says he didn't stop to look close, but he was pretty sure it was E Gray. Says he knows because he's had access to the viewscope and has watched E Gray on the surface of Eden." "There's been no report of any ship leaving Eden, joining you, Captain," Hayes said accusingly. "Because there hasn't been any," the captain snapped back. "So it can't have been E Gray she was embracing. That's why I called you. Looks like we're going to have some petty scandal mixed up with everything else." "Looks like it, then," Hayes said with a vast weariness. "Some member of your crew, or one of the scientists," he said. "Keep looking. Somebody's hiding her, probably to keep the scandal from breaking. But it seems odd to me that she was so anxious to get out there near her husband and then in ten days she'd ..."