agents are? I don't mean the bright-eyed grads of our technical schools, like the ones on my squad downstairs, I mean the full agents. The men who plan the operations, do the preliminary fieldwork and see that everything comes off smoothly. They're crooks. All crooks. The better they were on their own, the better a job they do for the Corps. It's a great, big, brawling universe and you would be surprised at some of the problems that come up. The only men we can recruit to do the job are the ones who have already succeeded at it.

"Are you on?"

It had happened too fast and I hadn't had time to think, I would probably go on arguing for an hour. But way down in the back of my mind the decision had been made. I was going to do it, I couldn't say no.

There was the beginning of a warm glow, too. The human race is gregarious, I knew that even though I had been denying it for years.

I was going to keep on doing the loneliest job in the universe—only I wasn't going to be doing it alone.

THE END

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