when you was comin' back. We're halfway to the cradle. What's the good word?"

"The good word," grinned his informant, "is that I've paved the way. Miss Graham is going to ask her father to let us stay at the Patrol base."

"Huh?" Mulligan looked baffled. "What's good about that? We could've stayed at the Patrol Base anyway. All you had to do was tell Colonel Graham who you were—"

His superior officer groaned in mock despair.

"Sometimes I wonder if that cranium of yours is good for anything but a hair-garden! Don't you see, Bud, that the whole scheme depends on our being invited to become guests at the Patrol base? Of course, we could present our credentials, walk directly from the Gaea to headquarters. But it would be a cold tip-off to Grossman that we are S.I.D. men.

"As it is, he hasn't got the faintest idea that 'Doctor Rockingham Roswell' and his 'valet' are members of the Solar Investigation Department. He thinks I'm a very badly rattled pedagogue, and you're a mealy-mouthed nonentity. And that is exactly what we want him to believe—until we get the goods on him."

"Then he is our man?"

"I'm practically certain of it now. He's as nervous as a cat. Flared up the moment I questioned his reasons for living on Titan. As factor of the New Boston trading-post he is in an ideal situation to stir up trouble amongst the Titanians. And that's precisely what he has been doing. We don't know exactly why—yet!—but it's quite clear that for some reason of his own he wants all Earthmen save himself to leave Titan."

"Gold, maybe?" suggested Bud. "Oil? Ekalastron?"

"No-o-o, I don't think so. The mineralogists would have detected the presence of any of those when they surveyed Titan. His reason is something deeper than that—Say! Wait a minute! I wonder if it possibly—?"

"Yeah?"

"No, I'm crazy! It couldn't be that. I happened to think of that T-radiation. But I don't believe even Grossman is enough of a scientist to have discovered what it is or how it can be used—if at all. Well, anyhow—"

"Anyhow, we're in at the Base. And Grossman doesn't suspect us. That's part of the job. So—the next move?"

"We circulate. We move around and ask questions and 

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