another seafood dinner!"

"Maybe somebody else will think of something," said Westervelt, partly to conceal the fact that he himself had come up with nothing.

"Tell you what," said Smith, nodding. "Suppose you go along and see how Bob Lydman is making out, while I sign these letters. You might check at the com room sometime, too, in case anything else on the case comes in."

Westervelt agreed, made sure he had something in his pocket to write upon should the need arise, and left.

A few minutes later, he reached the end of the corridor, having cocked an ear at the door of the old file office as he passed and heard Beryl giggling at some remark by Parrish. He unclenched his teeth and knocked on Lydman's door.

He waited a minute and tried again, but there was still no answer.

He hesitated, wondering what would happen should he walk in and find that Lydman was physically present but not in a mood to recognize any one else's existence. Slowly, he walked back to the washroom on the opposite side of the hall.

Washing his hands with deliberation, Westervelt decided that it might be best to get Lydman on the phone. He could not, in fact, understand why inside phone calls were not more popular in the office. He supposed that the face-to-face habit had grown up among the staff, probably reflecting Smith's preference for getting everyone personally involved in everything. There might even be a deeper cause—they were so often in contact with distant places by the tenuous beaming of interstellar signals that there must be a certain reassurance and sense of security in having within physical reach the person to whom one was speaking.

"I'll have to watch for that if I stay here long enough," Westervelt told himself. "You don't have to be a prizefighter to get punchy, I guess."

He examined himself critically in the mirror over the sink, thinking that he could do with a neater appearance. A coin in the slot of a dispenser on the wall bought him a disposable paper comb with which he smoothed down his dark hair.

I need a haircut almost as bad as Castor P. he thought. I wonder if that really stands for Pollux? What a thing for parents to do! On the other hand, from people that came up with one like him, you'd expect almost anything!

No one came in while 

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