"What about that night at Horseshoe Bay," I broke in. "I don't know what you are talking about." It was useless, and had been from the start. All three men stuck to the same story. They were White Russians in the pay of a Japanese fishing company, partly as laboratory workers and partly for their ability to speak several languages. We went back to the Governor's house feeling defeated. This was an anticlimax. The only points in our favor were that we had recognized the boat and three crew members immediately, and our descriptions of the men, given in Canada, corresponded quite well with their present appearance. Unfortunately, I had washed the fingerprints off the aerosol bomb in the shower, and with them, the only material evidence of the Russians' connection with the S-Flu. Or was it? I was thinking over the problem as we sat down to a late lunch. * * * * * While we ate both the Ecuadoreans and Americans questioned us politely but thoroughly. As they explained to us, the question of identity was extremely important. We were the only witnesses that the captured Russians had actually possessed a virus-filled aerosol bomb and on that one fact might rest the future of the world. Where they had come from was by no means certain. The ship's papers, and those of the crew indicated Hakodate as their port of origin but the Japanese embassy in Quito had indignantly repudiated them, insisting that no such ship was registered in Hokkaido. There was nothing to link them with the USSR, which had not bothered, so far, to answer the first discreet inquiries. "Did the Russians tell you where they came from?" I asked. "From Hokkaido," the American military attache said. "No, no, I mean recently. Where has the ship been sailing." "They claim they've been following currents across the Pacific, looking for new fishing grounds." "Then they were not near British Columbia?" "Not according to their stories, nor to the ship's log." "There's a couple of ways we might check that. The Russians went ashore in B.C. Maybe they'll have pollen grains or dust in their clothes that could be traced to that part of the world." "It's a possibility. We'll look into it." "And then there's my sloop. We scraped along the side of the fishing boat and some paint must have come off. I haven't had time to repair it. At least that might prove we have met before, if the paints are similar, which would make our bomb warfare theory much more credible." "It certainly would. We need all the evidence we can get." "What are you going to do with them?" I asked the senior American officer after lunch.