Hissing between his clamped teeth Karrin leaned over Rhiannon's wide shoulder and speared a finger at the control board. The Patrolmen had made the mistake of judging his boat at its space-yacht face value, but it was far more than that. The "yacht's" concealed atomicannons blasted the other craft into radioactive dust. The frantically gesticulating figure of Janus was swallowed by the glare, and when space darkened again there was only the fused cable end, chewed off short near Karrin's porthole. "Ge-ez!" cried Rhiannon. "Why'd you do that?" [Illustration: _"Why'd you do that?" cried Rhiannon._] "Didn't you see?" Karrin snapped. "It was a Rebel boat! Janus must have been a spy!" "But there was a Patrol Nova on--" "Rhiannon--you've done a magnificent job!" Karrin clapped a hand on the giant's arm and tightened it emotionally. He slipped the safety on his pocketed atom pistol with the other hand. "That wasn't a Nova--that was the Rebel Tetra!" Rhiannon looked up at him, his forehead plowed over with thought; then gradually a wide grin spread his lips. "We done it, didn't we?" "We sure did." Karrin's face was flattened at the cheeks. How the Patrol had known of this meeting he would never know, short of torturing each of his "cooperative men." Janus was gone. The briefcase was gone. The real Rebel boat was probably bright drifting dust somewhere between here and Llarn's moon. Karrin shivered. Would the Patrol have his office covered? Had they known _whom_ they were trapping? Or had the tip-off not mentioned names? "One way to find out." Rhiannon looked up vaguely. "What, sir?" "Get us back to Llarn, Rhiannon. I've got to report this to the President." The swirling salt of the nebula moved out of the port and vanished as the big man tailed the boat around and side-stepped it into hyper-space. Karrin stood with wet hands clasped at his back. My papers. My money. I'll get them and make a run for Rebel H.Q. Surely the tip had not implicated him or he would never have gotten off Llarn in the first place. The Patrol would have seen to that: they knew that so many things could go wrong out in space. Such as, he thought with grim satisfaction, what _had_ gone wrong. * * * * * The Government Spaceport was emptied and darkened by the evening. Steve Podalski and his brethren had gone to their homes, Tweety had gone sailing up into the stratosphere to sleep, and the only living creature was Sergeant Atoms who lay twitching his paws in a dream-chase. From the floor of Bed 52 Rhiannon watched Karrin labor up the motionless 'scalator, saw the lights flicker on, saw his employer move about shoving things into a carrycase. Rhiannon's affliction may be said to have been "stroboscopic" in character. That is, his brain functioned with an irregular alternation of clarity and fuddle. At this moment the lights were on in that great skull and his brain cells were skittering about, playing with a Thought.