"So I thought, until your rib began to trouble you. The reaction of an ordinary woman would have been to stop."

"Am I an ordinary woman?"

"Decidedly not. That's why the situation has become so interesting."

"I don't understand, Perat." She sat down beside him, forcing him to move his legs so that his left hand was jammed under the cushion.

"A little while ago, I decided to contact Gorph's mind." He took a sip. "It seems he had been trying to reach me through the communications box."

"He had?" She pictured Gorph's old-womanish anxiety. He had found the sealed message, then, but hadn't been able to verify it because his chief had been listening to a tale of gods. Had he or had he not sent the message by the early jet? It had to be! Possibly all five of the columns had been drawn by now, but she couldn't assume it. The strain-pile would not erupt for a full Terran hour after the fifth column has been drawn. From now until death, of one sort or another, she must delay, delay, delay.

Her blue eyes were widely innocent, and puzzled, but the nerves of her arms were going dead with over-tension. Perhaps if she threw the terif in his eyes with her left hand and crushed the numbing supraclavicular nerve with her thumb....

Perat turned his head for the first time and looked her full in the face.

"Gorph says he sent the message," he said tonelessly.

She looked at him blankly, then casually removed her hand from his knee and dropped it in her lap. He must absolutely not be alarmed until she knew more. "Apparently I'm supposed to know what you're talking about."

He turned back to the ceiling. "Gorph says someone prepared a priority dispatch with my signature, and he sent it out. I don't suppose you have any idea who did it?"

Time! Time!

"When I was Gorph's assistant, there was a young officer—I can't remember his name—who sometimes forged your signature to urgent actions when Gorph was out. This is true, Perat. My mind is open to you."

He fastened his luminous grey eyes on her. "I presume you're lying, but...." His mental probe skimmed rapidly over her cortical association centers. Her skill was strained to the utmost, setting up false memories of each of thousands of synaptic 

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