Their headquarters was a small suite of rooms in a middle class residential hotel in the heavily populated metropolitan area between Washington and Baltimore. Few of the Federal Security agents, Psi-High or otherwise, knew this. They knew only a visiphone priority code number, and a special word-key for scrambling. This was as Faircloth insisted. Of all the agents posted and assigned, only Paul, Jean, and Roberts knew the true nature of the operation, and each of them worked out their own illogical details without telling the others. The wisdom of such a procedure was graphically illustrated a dozen times over for the Alien at work was thorough. An operative in Pittsburgh had attempted resistance to the Alien's telepathic overtures, as instructed, and suffered a burst of wrath that had left him blubbering in a corner for three days until a crew from Hoffman Center straightened him out with a week's diet of amphetamine and glucose. More and more, the Alien's puzzlement and frustration and wrath began to seep through, and Paul and Jean watched the reports, and nodded approvingly. Three times, when they were sure that the Alien had left a locality, they ordered cleanup squads to make raids on his former quarters, quizzing the inhabitants and neighbors, asking a multitude of idiotic questions, uncovering a half a dozen descriptions and leads which they assiduously ignored. Then they began stabbing erratically at locations where the Alien had _not_ yet been, raids which were carried out with a viciousness and singleness of mind that left the unfortunates who were questioned quaking in their boots. On these raids, even the agents themselves were confused as to their purpose. And there were other tactics, a myriad of disjointed, unconnected, abortive, harassing procedures, as though the whole search had suddenly fallen into the hands of a madman. A rocketship bound for Venus was delayed four days beyond an opposition, adding a half-million dollars to the cost of fueling it. A whole series of road blocks were thrown up between New York and New Philadelphia, virtually paralyzing the commercial traffic between the cities for two days. Quite suddenly, the order went out to close down on all passengers in the great St. Louis-New York rolling roads, and Robert Roberts put in a grueling week soothing the ruffled feelings of the businessmen who had been held up and the companies whose products had spoiled when the swift-moving strips had ground to a halt. The news that there _was_ an Alien from the stars at large, that Federal Security was waging a vast underground battle to capture him, was no longer a deep secret. The tension mounted daily.