DuQuesne caught the falling man neatly with an attractor beam and lowered him gently to the now-deserted roof of the Perkins Café--that famous restaurant which had been planned and was maintained by the World Steel Corporation as a blind for its underground activities. He then seated himself at his console and drove his projection down into the innermost private office of World Steel. He did not at first thicken the pattern into visibility, but remained invisible, studying Brookings, now president of that industrial octopus, the World Steel Corporation. The magnate was seated as of yore in a comfortably padded chair at his massive and ornate desk, the focus and the center of a maze of secret private communication bands and even more secret private wires. For Steel was a growing octopus and its voraciously insatiable maw must be fed. Brookings had but one motto, one tenet--get it. By fair play at times, although this method was employed but seldom; by bribery, corruption, and sabotage as the usual thing; by murder, arson, mayhem, and all other known forces of foul play if necessary or desirable--Steel got it. To be found out was the only sin, and that was usually only venial instead of cardinal; for it was because of that sometimes unavoidable contingency that Steel not only retained the shrewdest legal minds in the world, but also wielded certain subterranean forces sufficiently powerful to sway even supposedly incorruptible courts of justice. Occasionally, of course, the sin was cardinal; the transgression irremediable: the court unreachable. In that case the octopus lost a very minor tentacle; but the men really guilty had never been brought to book. Into the center of this web, then, DuQuesne drove his projection and listened. For a whole long week he kept at Brookings' elbow, day and night. He listened and spied, studied and planned, until his now gigantic mentality not only had grasped every detail of everything that had developed during his long absence and of everything that was then going on, but also had planned meticulously the course which he would pursue. Then, late one afternoon, he cut in his audio and spoke. "I knew of course that you would try to double-cross me, Brookings, but even I had no idea that you would make such an utter fool of yourself as you have." As he heard the sneering, cutting tone of the scientist's well-remembered voice, the magnate seemed to shrink visibly; his face turning a pasty gray as the blood receded from it. "DuQuesne!" he gasped. "Where--are you?" "I'm right beside you, and I have been for over a week." DuQuesne thickened his image to full visibility and grinned sardonically as the man at the desk reached hesitantly toward a button. "Go ahead and push it--and see what happens. Surely even you are not dumb enough to suppose that a man with my brain--even the brain I had when I left here--would take any chances with such a rat as you have always shown yourself to be?"