Her brother, an electronic engineer, was dying by inches in a Wendel laboratory. Slow, radio-active poisoning meant very little to Wendel Atomics apparently, when just one small human cog was afflicted with it and they still needed his services. So she had used her own knowledge of electronics and a very great resourcefulness and a high I.Q. to stow away in a cybernetic robot and was on her way to Mars to see what a woman of courage, entirely alone, could do to save the life of the only brother she had. She had tried to get a clearance from the Board and failed and that explained how she happened to be in the New Chicago spaceport bar when my own life had been in even more immediate danger ... because slow, radio-active poisoning takes a long time to kill and if you can stop it in time there's always a chance that the victim will recover. "I've been checking up ever since you left," Littlefield was saying. "I managed to get through to Earth on the needle frequencies and Trilling knows now that you showed me the silver bird. The code I used to tell him that was too complicated to be broken by the big-brained inhabitants of Alpha Centauri's third planet, if--as seems unlikely--such a planet exists." "And you didn't even tell me," I said. "I suppose I should be burned up about it." "No, you shouldn't be. I just saved you a lot of unnecessary explaining. You can talk to Trilling all you want to from here on in, but I've cushioned the shock for you, taken a little of the edge off the way he seemed to feel for a minute or two." "Well ... all right," I said. "Just what did you tell him." "I asked him to do what he could to confirm her story. So far everything she told us seems to check out. Of course, they haven't been able to turn up too much, and she could still be lying. But we may get more on it later on. Don't count on it, though. I may not even be able to contact Trilling again. The needle frequencies are as unreliable as hell, as you know." "But you just said I could talk to Trilling myself--" "If we're lucky. You can't express yourself with precision when you're as troubled as I am right now." I was troubled too ... perhaps more than he was. But just trying to make that concern dwindle a little by turning all the knobs on and off kept me from thinking about it. "Well ... he could have recognized her," I said. "There could have been a link there, since he was a Wendel secret agent and her brother works for Wendel. Maybe they sent him her brother's photograph over the needle frequencies and said: 'Look around for a girl who resembles this man and keep an eye on her. She's one little girl we're worried about." "Oh, sure, that could be it."