little slack managing?"

The picture of Jeffers huddled with his partners in the headquarters building, plotting the next move, brought Tolliver to his feet.

There was nothing in the unused office but an old table and half a dozen plastic crates. He saw that the latter contained a mess of discarded records.

"Better than nothing at all," he muttered.

He ripped out a double handful of the forms, crumpled them into a pile at the doorway, and pulled out his cigarette lighter.

"What do you think you're up to?" asked Betty with some concern.

"This plastic is tough," said Tolliver, "but it will bend with enough heat. If I can kick loose a hinge, maybe we can fool them yet!"

He got a little fire going, and fed it judiciously with more papers.

"You know," he reflected, "it might be better for you to stay here. He can't do much about you, and you don't have any real proof just by yourself."

"I'll come along with you, Tolliver," said the girl.

"No, I don't think you'd better."

"Why not?"

"Well ... after all, what would he dare do? Arranging an accident to the daughter of the boss isn't something that he can pull off without a lot of investigation. He'd be better off just running for it."

"Let's not argue about it," said Betty, a trifle pale but looking determined. "I'm coming with you. Is that stuff getting soft yet?"

Tolliver kicked at the edge of the door experimentally. It seemed to give slightly, so he knocked the burning papers aside and drove his heel hard at the corner below the hinge.

The plastic yielded.

"That's enough already, Tolliver," whispered the girl. "We can crawl through!"

Hardly sixty seconds later, he led her into a maze of stacked crates in the warehouse proper. The building was not much longer than wide, for each of the structures in the colony had its own hemispherical emergency dome of transparent plastic. They soon reached the other end.

"I think there's a storeroom for spacesuits around here," muttered Tolliver.

 Prev. P 8/14 next