Samson, who was tall, beefy and blond, looked at Midge, dark and apparently fragile, who was curled into a very small ball among the cushions on the other side of the room. "Did you know Jackson?" he asked.

She nodded soberly. "A very good boy," she said.

"M-hm. You got that manual?"

"Here." She put the cube into the reader set into the table in front of her, and began scanning for page 9581. Samson walked over and sat beside her.

There was a good deal about the Kassids, also known as the Akassa, the Ksits, the Karsis, the Krassit, the Karss and the Krathis. All the older races in this section of the galaxy had legends about them. It was not particularly surprising that Harlow had had to look them up; they were just one item among the tangled mass of folk-legend and myth that had been gleaned from a thousand inhabited worlds.

Nobody, said the manual, knew whether the Kassids had been a historic culture or a widespread myth. They were magicians, or demigods, or, as Jackson had put it, big medicine men; they were purer and nobler than anybody else, they knew more about everything, they could change their shapes at will, et cetera. The fact that more than five hundred planets had the same or similar legends proved nothing, because all the races in question, dull as they were, had had limited interstellar travel millenia before the arrival of Man. Most of the legends agreed that the Kassids had gone away, amid weeping and wailing from the lesser tribes, some fifteen thousand years ago.

But now they were back—and something they had done to Jackson had made him leave his post, and caused seventeen other people to leave theirs, and had got them all killed.

"I won't say I like it much," Midge said. "How are you fixed for ideas?"

"Information first," said Samson didactically; "ideas after." He added, not to Midge, "Take a message."

The light-tube glowed pink.

"Charles Samson to Head Librarian, Lubyanka Central Archives. Urgent. Request all available material on the Kassids, K-A-S-S-I-D-S. Don't digest it—put it straight through on facsimile. Over to you."

He clipped a fresh cube into the receiver in the center of the room. After twenty minutes, a female voice said, "Information coming through. Over." The recording light glowed; Samson turned on the reader and glanced at the 

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