tired, and very much in keeping with his snowy hair. "You see, the Space Scouts have vanished."
I came up in the chair, ramrod-straight. "Their mothers--they've been getting letters and--"
"Forgeries, Fakes. Counterfeits."
"You mean whoever took the Scouts is falsifying--"
"No. _My_ men are doing the work. Handpicked crews, day and night, have been sending those letters to the trusting mothers. It's been ghastly, Delvin. Hard on the men, terribly hard. Undotted _i_'s, misuse of tenses, deliberate misspellings. They take it out of an adult, especially an adult with a mind keen enough to get him into Interplanetary Security. We've limited the shifts to four hours per man per day. Otherwise, they'd all be gibbering by now!""And your men haven't found out anything?" I marvelled.

Baxter shook his head.

"And you finally had to resort to the Brain, and it gave you my name,
but no reason for it?"

Baxter cupped his slightly jowled cheeks in his hands and propped his
elbows on the desktop, suddenly slipping out of his high position to
talk to me man-to-man. "Look, son, an adding machine--which is a minor
form of an electronic brain, and even works on the same principle--can
tell you that two and two make four. But can it tell you why?"

"Well, no, but--"

"That, in a nutshell is our problem. We coded and fed to the Brain
every shred of information at our disposal; the ages of the children,
for instance, and all their physical attributes, and where they were
last seen, and what they were wearing. Hell, everything! The machine
took the factors, weighed them, popped them through its billions of
relays and tubes, and out of the end of the answer slot popped a single
sheet. The one you just saw. Your dossier."

"Then I'm to be sent to Mars?" I said, nervously.

"That's just it," Baxter sighed. "We don't even know that! We're like a
savage who finds a pistol: used correctly, it's a mean little weapon;
pointed the wrong way, it's a quick suicide. So, you are our weapon.
Now, the question is: Which way do we point you?"

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