"Because it's not true, Delvin," he said. His voice was suddenly old and tired, and very much in keeping with his snowy hair. "You see, the Space Scouts have vanished." I came up in the chair, ramrod-straight. "Their mothers--they've been getting letters and--" "Forgeries, Fakes. Counterfeits." "You mean whoever took the Scouts is falsifying--" "No. _My_ men are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night, have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted _i_'s, misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!" "And your men haven't found out anything?" I marvelled. Baxter shook his head. "And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name, but no reason for it?" Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to talk to me man-to-man. "Look, son, an adding machine--which is a minor form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle--can tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why? "Well, no, but--" "That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children, for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier." "Then I'm to be sent to Mars?" I said, nervously. "That's just it," Baxter sighed. "We don't even know that! We're like a savage who finds a pistol: used correctly, it's a mean little weapon; pointed the wrong way, it's a quick suicide. So, you are our weapon. Now, the question is: Which way do we point you?" "You got me!" I shrugged hopelessly. "However, since we have nothing else to go on but the locale from which the children vanished, my suggestion would be to send you there." "Mars, you mean," I said. "No, to the spaceship _Phobos II_. The one they were returning to Earth in when they disappeared." "They disappeared from a spaceship? While in space?" Baxter nodded. "But that's impossible," I said, shaking my head against this disconcerting thought. "Yes," said Baxter. "That's what bothers me." 3 _Phobos II_, for obvious reasons, was berthed in a Top Security spaceport. Even so, they'd shuttled it into a hangar, safe from the eyes of even their own men, and as a final touch had hidden the ship's nameplate beneath magnetic repair-plates.