"Save it," said Horitz. "He did. I'll take his head, Sommers, you take his feet. Walsh, think you can carry Oscar?" "Listen, Phil," said Sommers abruptly, "are the Equations gone?" "Yes," Horitz told him. "They're gone." Walsh grunted and, stooping, wrapped his arms around the black thing. He lifted it without apparent effort. The stumpy tendrils waved down toward him, then stood upright again, ignoring him. The other two picked up the body of Thomasson, and all three walked back to the levitor well from which they had come. Captain Tooker and the medical officer, Dr. Evans, met them at the door of the dead man's stateroom. Tooker was boiling over. "Do you call yourselves Security agents?" he shouted. "Three of you, to protect one man, and you couldn't do it. I'll raise hell about this, Horitz, see if I don't." Horitz and Sommers put the body down on the bed, and Dr. Evans fell quietly to examining it. "We'll find the killer," said Horitz grimly, "or else any hell you can raise will be a sneeze in a gale of wind. You don't know the half of this yet." "I know that a man has been murdered on my ship," said Tooker. "A man!" said Sommers, staring at him. "A whole planet may have been murdered, unless we get the Equations back." "What equations?" said Tooker. "What the devil are you talking about?" "The Thomasson Equations," said Sommers, "are the answer to the problem of faster-than-light space travel. Prof. Thomasson derived them from observations he made on the space shell this thing--" he gestured at Oscar--"landed on Pluto in, last year." Captain Tooker glanced at Oscar with evident dislike. "Well," he said, "what are you going to do about it?" "Have the ship searched," said Horitz quietly; "but that won't do any good. There are a hundred ways the killer could hide the Equations so that no search would ever find them. Our one chance, I'm afraid, is to get the only witness to tell us who garroted Thomasson." "The witness?" said the captain, staring. "Who?" Horitz turned to look at the black, five-foot lump, with its gently waving tendrils. "Oscar," he said. * * * * * Oscar had come whirling out of interstellar space almost a year ago, in a thin, cloudy shell hardly bigger than himself. The shell was partly wrecked and put out of control; but by sheer luck, a supply ship had picked it up and hauled it in to Pluto. The newspapers had labeled its occupant a Centaurian, since he came from that general sector of space; but actually, no one knew. The scientists at the Pluto Station who had sweated over him for a year had found out exasperatingly little. He had no eyes or ears, and yet he was aware of things around him. He had no recognizable brain; he had no skeleton, no lungs, no circulatory system and no excretory system. He got his energy, they thought, from cosmic radiation; but they didn't know for sure.