“We think he will,” the Lensman thought, narrowing down. “We’re dealing with a _very_ shrewd operator. We hope he does, anyway, because a snooper put on you or any one of your key people would be manna from heaven for us.” “But how _could_ he suspect us?” Cloud demanded. “We couldn’t have been on four planets at once.” “You will have been on three of them, though; and I can tell you now that routing was not exactly coincidence.” “Oh . . . and I wasn’t informed?” “No. Top Brass didn’t want to disturb you too much, especially since we hoped to catch him before things got this far along. But you’re in it now, clear to the neck. You and your people will be under surveillance every second, from here on in, and you’ll be covered as no chief of state was ever covered in all history.” ----- [3] A few months later, Joan did send him the full game, which white of course won. Thlasoval studied it in secret for over five years; and then, deciding correctly that he never would be able to understand its terrifically complex strategy, he destroyed the tape. It is perhaps superfluous to all that this game was never published. E.E.S. _Chapter 15_ ▂▂▂▂▂▂JOAN AND HER BRAINS THE TRIP FROM Chickladoria to Vegia, while fairly long, was uneventful. Joan spent her working hours, of course, at her regular job of rebuilding the giant computer. Cloud spent his at the galactic chart or in the control room staring into a tank; classifying, analyzing, building up and knocking down hypotheses and theories, wringing every possible drop of knowledge from all the data he could collect. In their “spare” time, of which each had quite a great deal, they worked together at their telepathy; to such good purpose that, when so working, verbal communication between them became rarer and rarer. And, alone or in a crowd, within sight of each other or not, in any place or at any time, asleep or awake, each had only to think at the other and they were instantly in full mental rapport. And oftener and oftener there came those instantaneously-fleeting touches of something infinitely more than mere telepathy; that fusion of minds which was so ultimately intimate that neither of the two could have said whether he longed for or dreaded its full coming the more. In fact, for several days before reaching Vegia, each knew that they could bring about that full fusion any time they chose to do so; but both shied away from its consummation, each as violently as the other. Thus the trip did not seem nearly as long as it actually was. The first order of business on Vegia, of course, was the extinguishment of its five loose atomic vortices—for which reason this was to be pretty much a planetary holiday, although that is of little concern here.