The General refolded his morning paper, and set it neatly in its accustomed upper left hand corner of his desk. He was pleased. By now the gossip columnists would be in full cry; the afternoon papers would be worth seeing. From his briefcase, he took a flat envelope, and excerpted three microfilms. He threw the first one on the desk reader, and glanced through it again: Chris was too damn _involved_ with Wendt, he thought worriedly. The message was somehow, almost intangibly, fuzzy; not Chris’ usual clear-stated summary, anyhow. And somehow the man had completely missed seeing the obvious newspaper advantages. Prentiss had just about bust a gut getting the press release ready when word came from Relay--and Chris hadn’t even thought to call him during the week on it, so they could get set ahead. Nobody (but _no_body, the General thought chuckling reminiscently) was going to believe that Johnny Wendt had gone up to the Moon, in the company of a beautiful dancer, both under strictest security to the point of full-trip sedation, and come back, the same way, the same _Messenger_ orbit, leaving the gal behind, for purely _personal_, non-significant reasons. He found it hard to believe himself. The more he thought about it, the more the overtones--or undertones?--of the courier-message from Christensen bothered him. _Hell_, he decided: _It’s good copy. That’s all._ And what _could_ Chris be pulling? It didn’t make sense enough to worry over. So he stopped worrying. The next film he had also seen at home the night before, but he studied it carefully again. It was long: five single-spaced typed pages, compactly written; and it contained the life history of Ramon E. McLafferty, Congressman from East Chile, white hope of the Industrialist Party, Chairman of the Space Security Subcommittee of the Joint House-Senate Space Affairs Committee--former ranch hand, bookie, stock yard “insurance”-protection boss, newspaper owner, fighting union smasher, contractor for nearly 20% of the work on construction of the _Messenger_, minority holder of Undersea Corp. stock, and probable next junior Chilean Senator. The General spent some time rereading, and reading again, the story of Ray McLafferty’s rags-to-riches rise--plus an abstract of a psychoanalytic report, and some dirty-edges peripheral track-trailing. When he felt quite sure he had all the pertinent facts in his mind, he took the film and placed it immediately in the special miniature safe at the back of his bottom desk drawer. The third film was a standard form from M.I., stamped across the top with block-lettered TOP SECRET’s. This one Harbridge had gotten on his way to work. It was, as it turned out, the most interesting document of the three.