"Aw, come on, Si! What if I'd been in the doorway when he came through?"

"What is it, anyway?" asked the other girl.

Westervelt looked around as she rose. Beryl Austin, he thought, would be a knockout if only there were less of a hint of ice about her. She was, in her high heels, only an inch shorter than he. Her face was round, but with a delicate bone structure that lent it an odd beauty. Westervelt was privately of the opinion that she spoiled the effect by wearing her hair in a style too short and too precisely arranged. And too bleached, he told himself.

The talk was that before coming to the Department, she had won two or three minor beauty contests. That might explain the meticulous make-up and the smart blue dress that followed the curves of her figure so flatteringly. Westervelt suspected, from hints dropped by Simonetta Diorio, that this was insufficient qualification for being a secretary, even in such a peculiar institution as Department 99. Of course, maybe Smith had ideas of making her a field agent.

He held out the package in the palm of his hand.

"They said at the London lab that it was a special flashlight that would pass for an ordinary one."

"Oh, the one for that Antares case," exclaimed Beryl. "Si was telling me how they'll send out plans of that. Did they show you how it works?"

"It gives just a dim beam until you press an extra switch," said Westervelt. "Then it puts out a series of dashes bright enough to hurt your eyes."

"What in the world do they want that for?" asked Beryl.

"What in some other world, you mean! On some of these planets, the native life is so used to a dim red sun that a flash like this on their sensitive eyes can knock them unconscious."

"This place is just full of dirty tricks like that," said the blonde. "Why can't they free these people some other way?"

Westervelt and Simonetta looked at each other. Beryl had been in the Department only a few weeks, and did not yet seem to have heard the word.

Or understood it, maybe, thought Westervelt. She might not look half so intelligent without that nice chest expansion.

"Some of them just get in trouble," Simonetta was saying. "The laws of alien peoples we've 

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