"You saw me click the officer-section communicator on and talk into it for a minute or two," he went on. "I ordered a double guard posted in the Chart Room, but I told them not to touch the body until I had a chance to get down there myself. It's just as well I did, because something was found on the body I wouldn't have wanted anyone else to see." He was smiling a little and I wondered why, until he exploded the bombshell--the thing he'd said would rock me back on my heels. "He'd deceived the Board with a vengeance, apparently. There was a sealed envelope on him and when I tore it open there was a card in it. It wasn't a Board clearance card. It was a Wendel Atomics private police card and it identified him as the kind of secret agent you'd trade in for a snake if you _had_ to have something poisonous on board and were given a free choice in the matter. The Wendel police are little better than hired killers--although perhaps a few of them are generous-minded enough to feel that when you've beaten a man insensible it's going a little too far to put a bullet in him as well. And the Wendel secret agents are the worst sadists of the lot. They're hand-picked for shrewdness and when you get intelligence along with brutality there's no refinement of cruelty that won't be resorted to when the going gets rough." "Good God!" I said. "So that's why--No ... no. It doesn't quite explain why just the sight of Helen Barclay emerging from the robot enraged him the way it did. Just the fact that there was a woman stowaway on Board shouldn't have angered him at all. It wasn't his headache, because he was merely masquerading as a crewman. Even a man who felt some responsibility in the matter would have only been a little angered." Littlefield nodded. "Don't think that hasn't occurred to me. If he'd never set eyes on her before, or had no idea who she was ... it's hard to see why he should have become enraged, as you say. That's why I've gone to such lengths to make sure she was telling us the full truth when she explained why getting to Mars was so important to her." He didn't have to read from the paper he was still holding to help me recall in detail everything she'd said during that part of the question-and-answer session. It had made too deep an impression on me. It had also struck a vital nerve, because it was tied in with my assignment. Not directly, because I could have completed my big job without so much as talking to her again. But she was going to Mars because of something that Wendel Atomics had done. Wendel Atomics was the exposed nerve, because anything that had to do with the Martian power combines was of vital interest to me, if only on the general information level. In her case it was a personal matter, just between Wendel and herself. A very small matter to Wendel but overwhelmingly important to her.