"Have the ship searched," said Horitz quietly; "but that won't do any good. There are a hundred ways the killer could hide the Equations so that no search would ever find them. Our one chance, I'm afraid, is to get the only witness to tell us who garroted Thomasson."

"The witness?" said the captain, staring. "Who?"

Horitz turned to look at the black, five-foot lump, with its gently waving tendrils. "Oscar," he said.

Oscar had come whirling out of interstellar space almost a year ago, in a thin, cloudy shell hardly bigger than himself. The shell was partly wrecked and put out of control; but by sheer luck, a supply ship had picked it up and hauled it in to Pluto. The newspapers had labeled its occupant a Centaurian, since he came from that general sector of space; but actually, no one knew. The scientists at the Pluto Station who had sweated over him for a year had found out exasperatingly little. He had no eyes or ears, and yet he was aware of things around him. He had no recognizable brain; he had no skeleton, no lungs, no circulatory system and no excretory system. He got his energy, they thought, from cosmic radiation; but they didn't know for sure.

His tendrils or filaments—the stumpy, fingerlike organs on top of his shapeless body—had no function that they would discover. They did not respond to sound, to light, to heat or any other known radiation—but they followed moving objects, in a dark room as well as in a light one.

He was somehow able to emit and receive radio waves. They were able to communicate with him, after a fashion, that way. They suspected it wasn't his normal method of communication; but when they ticked at him with a Morse sender, he obligingly ticked back. Slowly and painfully, during that year, they had worked up from 1 + 1 = 2, to 93 = 729, to simple nouns and a few verbs, in a code they invented as they went along. They could talk to Oscar, and Oscar could talk to them. The only trouble was, that nothing Oscar said made much sense—to men.

"That's the whole difficulty," explained Dr. Y. Ilyanov, running her fingers through her thick yellow hair. Dr. Ilyanov was one of the two assistants Thomasson had brought along, and very beautiful. The other was Dr. Hugh Meers, who was bald and not beautiful at all.

"You understand, he perceives—but he doesn't perceive with human senses or think in human patterns. Undoubtedly, he saw Professor Thomasson killed; but he saw it—differently."

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