"Of course, I regarded Karn's story as a wild dream, but it made corking good story material. I wrote it into a novel, and a week after it was completed, the manuscript was stolen from my study back on Earth."
"I see," I said as she lapsed into silence. "And now you've come to the conclusion that the details of your story were true and that someone is attempting to put your plot into action."
Grannie nodded. "Yes," she said. "That's exactly what I think."
I got my pipe out of my pocket, tamped Martian tobacco into the bowl and laughed heartily. "The same old Flowers," I said. "Tell me, who's your thief ... Doctor Universe?"
She regarded me evenly. "What makes you say that?"
I shrugged.
"The way the theater crowd acted. It all ties in."
The old woman shook her head. "No, this is a lot bigger than a simple quiz program. The theater crowd was but a cross-section of what is happening all over the System. There have been riots on Earth and Mars, police officials murdered on Pluto and a demand that government by representation be abolished on Jupiter. The time is ripe for a military dictator to step in.
"And you can lay it all to the Green Flames. It seems incredible that a single shipload of the ore could effect such a wide ranged area, but in my opinion someone has found a means of making that quantity a thousand times more potent and is transmiting it en masse."
If it had been anyone but Grannie Annie there before me, I would have called her a fool. And then all at once I got an odd feeling of approaching danger.