"Well," Ferris Weldon said deprecatingly, "the government doesn't trust DEDCOM too far, of course. Still, the fact that it is strictly logical, encyclopedically informed and not hampered by common sense has produced surprisingly useful results from time to time. "Now don't get indignant again, Ben! I assure you I'm not being facetious. The fact is that sixteen years ago the charge that interplanetary colonization was being sabotaged was frequently enough raised. It had that appearance from the outside. Whatever could go wrong had gone wrong. There'd been an unbelievable amount of blundering." * * * * * "Nevertheless, all the available evidence indicated that no organized sabotage was involved. There was plenty of voluble opposition to the program, sometimes selfish, sometimes sincere. There were multiple incidents of forgetfulness, bad timing, simple stupidity. After years of false starts, the thing still appeared bogged down in a nightmare of--in the main--honest errors. But expensive ones. The month-by-month cost of continuing reached ridiculous proportions. Then came disasters which wiped out lives by the hundreds. The program's staunchest supporters began to get dubious, to change their minds. "I couldn't say at the moment which genius in the Department of Special Activities had the notion to feed the colonization problem to DEDCOM. Anyway, it was done, and DEDCOM, after due checking and rumination, not only stated decisively that it _was_ a matter of sabotage, after all; it further provided us with a remarkably detailed description of the saboteur...." Arlene Rolf interrupted. "There had been only one saboteur?" "Only one who knew what he was doing, yes." "The rogue telepath?" Dr. Lowry asked. "Who else?" "Then if the department has had his description...." "Why is he still at large?" Ferris Weldon asked, with a suggestion of grim amusement. "Wait till you hear what it sounded like at the time, Ben! I'll give it to you from memory. "Arlene has mentioned some of the points. The saboteur, DEDCOM informed us, was, first, a hypnotizing telepath. He could work on his victims from a distance, force them into the decisions and actions he wanted, leave them unaware that their minds had been tampered with, or that anything at all was wrong. "Next, he was an impersonator, to an extent beyond any ordinary meaning of the word. DEDCOM concluded he must be able to match another human being's appearance so closely that it would deceive his model's most intimate associates. And with the use of these two talents our saboteur had, in ten years, virtually wrecked the colonization program. "Without any further embellishments, DEDCOM's report of this malevolent superman at loose in our society would have raised official eyebrows everywhere...." "In particular," Miss Rolf asked, "in the Department of Special Activities?"