before it is boxed, and I shall do the packing myself. Why? Are you by any chance apprehensive that I may slip up?"

"Well, we can't be too sure." The fat man's blue eyes were now neither genial nor good-natured; they were piercing and cold. "In this game anybody who permits any leaks dies. And anyone who knows too much dies. We don't want you to die, at least until after we get started on Deka—"

"Nor then," the scientist interrupted cynically, "if you know when you're well off. I'm the only man in the universe who can run the apparatus. It would take a mighty good man three years to learn it after I get it going. Remember that, my friend."

"So what?" Graves' stare was coldly level.

"Just so you won't develop any funny ideas. I know as well as you do, however, about leaks and leakers. I don't leak. How long will it take you to get ready—three months?"

"Um—just about. And you?"

"Any time."

"Make it three months, then."

"Three months it is—on Deka." The interview was ended.

Newspoke—originally New Spokane—was the largest city of Dekanore III. It lay in the broad valley of the Spokane River, just above the mouth of Clear Creek, which latter stream meandered along a fertile valley between mountains lofty and steep. Clear Creek Valley—all of it—and all its neighboring mountains belonged to Tellurian Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

The valley floor was a riot of color, devoted as it was to the intensive cultivation of medicinal plants which could not as yet be grown economically in tanks. Along both edges of the valley extended rows of huge hydroponics sheds. Upon the mountains' sides there were snake dens, lizard pens, and enclosures for many other species of fauna.

Nor was the surface all that was in use. Those mountains were hollow, honeycombed into a host of rooms in which, under precisely controlled environments of temperature, atmosphere, and radiation, were grown and studied hundreds of widely-variant forms of life.

At the confluence of creek and river, just inside the city limits, there reared and sprawled the company's buildings, the 

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