official release. The editor was a little sore about my disappearance, but I had a perfect alibi. I was still looking for Hogan. That, my friends, was emphatically that.

At the Prog Building we hustled through the main offices and back up the curved stairs. On the way the C-S said he didn't think we ought to tell Yarr, the little old coot I'd hood-winked, the real truth. It would be just as well, he said, to let Yarr go on thinking I was a confidential secretary.

So we came again to that fantastic clockwork room with its myriad whirling cams and the revolving crystal and the hypnotic bam-bam of the motors. Yarr met us at the door and escorted us to the viewing desk with his peculiar absent-minded subservience. The room was darkened again, and once more we watched the cloud of blackness seep across the face of the Universe. The sight chilled me more than ever, now that I knew what it meant.

Groating turned to me and said: "Well, Mr. Carmichael, any suggestions?"

I said: "The first thing we ought to find out is just what that spaceship has to do with the black cloud ... don't you think so?"

"Why yes, I do." Groating turned to Yarr and said: "Give us a close-up of the spaceship and switch in sound. Give us the integration at normal speed."

Yarr said: "It would take a week to run the whole thing off. Any special moment you want, sir?"

I had a hunch. "Give us the moment when the auxiliary ship arrives."

Yarr turned back to his switch-board. We had a close-up of a great round port. The sound mechanism clicked on, running at high speed with a peculiar wheetledy-woodeldey-weedledy garble of shrill noises. Suddenly the cruiser shot into view. Yarr slowed everything down to normal speed.

The fat needle nosed into place, the ports clanged and hissed as the suction junction was made. Abruptly, the scene shifted and we were inside the lock between the two ships. Men in stained dungarees, stripped to the waist and sweating, were hauling heavy canvas-wrapped equipment into the mother ship. To one side two elderly guys were talking swiftly:

"You had difficulty?"

"More than ever. Thank God this is the last shipment."

"How about credits?"

"Exhausted."

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