Strongheart and his friend looked at each other and laughed.
"I checked up on him early," the zwilnik chuckled. "He isn't the Lensman, of course, but I thought at first he might be an agent. We frisked him and his ship thoroughly—no dice—and checked back on him as a miner, four solar systems back. He's clean, anyway; this is his second bender here. He's been guzzling everything in stock for a week, getting more pie-eyed every day, and Strongheart and I just put him to bed with twenty-four units of benny. You know what that means, don't you?"
"Your own benny or his?" the director asked.
"My own. That's why I know he's clean. All the other dopes are, too. The drunks we gave the bum's rush, like you told us to."
"QX. I don't think there's any danger, myself—I think that the hot-shot Lensman they're afraid of is still working Bronseca—but these orders not to take any chances at all come from 'way, 'way up."
"How about this new system they're working on, that nobody knows his boss any more?" asked the zwilnik. "Hooey, I call it."
"Not ready yet," the director answered. "They haven't been able to invent one that is safe enough for them and yet will handle the volume of work that has to be done. In the meantime, we're using these books. Cumbersome, but absolutely safe, they say, unless and until the enemy gets onto the idea. Then one group will go into the lethal chambers of the Patrol and the rest of us will use something else. Some say that this code can't be cracked without the key; others say any code can be read in time. Anyway here's your orders. Pass them along. Give me your stuff and we'll have supper and a few drinks."
They ate. They drank. They enjoyed an evening and a night of high revelry and low dissipation, each to his taste; each secure in the knowledge that his thought-screen was one-hundred-percent effective against the one enemy he really feared. Indeed, the screens were that effective—then. The Lensman, having learned from the director all that he knew, had restored the generator to full efficiency in the instant of his relinquishment of control.
Although the heads of the zwilniks, and therefore their minds, were secure against Kinnison's prying, the books of record were not. And, though his body was lying helpless, inert upon a drug-fiend's cot, his sense of perception read those books; if not as readily as though they were in his hands and open, yet readily enough. And, far off in space, a power-brained Lensman yclept Worsel, recorded upon imperishable metal a detailed account, including names, dates, facts, and figures, of all the doings of all the zwilniks of a solar system!
The information was coded, it is true; but, since Kinnison knew the key, it might just as well have been printed in English. To the later consternation of Narcotics, however, that tape was sent in under Lensman's seal—the spool could not be opened until the Gray Lensman gave the word.