CONTENTS 1. Cancel F's appointments 2. Investigate setup in Files a) Lang terraforming project b) faster-than-light c) budget—stretchable? d) locate spy pickups in building 3. Meeting with section chiefs 4. Press conference with telefax services 5. See Ludwig ... straighten things out 6. Redecorate office He thought for a moment, then erased a few of his numbers and changed Press conference to 6. and Redecorate office to 4. He licked the stylus and wrote in at the very top of the paper: CONTENTS 0. Finish Prior affair. In a way, FitzMaugham's assassination had taken Walton off the hook on the Prior case. Whatever FitzMaugham suspected about Walton's activities yesterday morning no longer need trouble him. If the director had jotted down a memorandum on the subject, Walton would be able to find and destroy it when he went through FitzMaugham's files later. And if the dead man had merely kept the matter in his head, well, then it was safely at rest in the crematorium. Walton groped in his jacket pocket and found the note his brother had slipped to him at lunchtime the day before. In the rush of events, Walton had not had a chance to destroy it. Now, he read it once more, ripped it in half, ripped it again, and fed one quarter of the note into the disposal chute. He would get rid of the rest at fifteen-minute intervals, and he would defy anyone monitoring the disposal units to locate all four fragments. Actually, he realized he was being overcautious. This was Director FitzMaugham's office and FitzMaugham's disposal chute. The director wouldn't have arranged to have his own chute monitored, would he? Or would he? There was never any telling, with FitzMaugham. The old man had been terribly devious in every maneuver he made. The room had the dry, crisp smell of the detecting devices that had been used—the close-to-the-ground, ugly metering-robots that had crawled all over the floor, sniffing up footprints and stray dandruff flakes for analysis, the chemical cleansers that had mopped the blood out of the rug. Walton cursed at the air-conditioner that was so inefficiently removing these smells from the air. The annunciator chimed. Walton waited impatiently for a voice, then remembered that FitzMaugham had doggedly required an
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