"But you think I'm screwy, huh?"
"Oh, no, Kinnison, I wouldn't say that. I only ... well ... after all, there isn't much real evidence that we didn't mop up one hundred percent."
"Much? Real evidence? There isn't any," the Tellurian assented, cheerfully enough. "But you've got the wrong slant entirely on these people. You are still thinking of them as gangsters, desperadoes, renegade scum of our own civilization. They are not. They are just as smart as we are; some of them are smarter. Perhaps I am taking too many precautions; but, if so, there is no harm done. On the other hand, there are two things at stake which, to me at least, are extremely important; this whole job of mine and my life: and remember this—the minute I leave this Base both of those things are in your hands."
To that, of course, there could be no answer.
While the two men had been talking and while the oglons were being brought out, two trickling streams of men had been passing, one into and one out of the spy ray shielded confines of Base. Some of these men were heavily bearded, some were shaven clean, but all had two things in common. Each one was human in type and each one in some respect or other resembled Kimball Kinnison.
"Now remember, Gerrond," the Gray Lensman said impressively as he was about to leave. "They're probably right here in Ardith, but they may be anywhere on the planet. Keep a spy ray on me wherever I go, and trace theirs if you can. That will take some doing, as the head one is bound to be an expert. Keep those oglons at least a mile—thirty seconds flying time—away from me; get all the Lensmen you can on the job; keep a cruiser and a speedster hot, but not too close. I may need one of them, or all, or none of them, I can't tell; but I do know this—if I need anything at all, I'll need it fast. Above all, Gerrond, by the Lens you wear, do nothing whatever, no matter what happens around me or to me, until I give you the word. QX?"
"QX, Gray Lensman. Clear ether!"
Kinnison took a ground-cab to the mouth of the narrow street upon which was situated his dock-walloper's mean lodging. This was a desperate, a fool-hardy trick—but in its very boldness, in its insolubly paradoxical aspects, lay its strength. Probably Boskone could solve its puzzles, but—he hoped—this ape, not being Boskone, couldn't. And, paying off the cabman, he thrust his hands into his tattered pockets and, whistling blithely if a bit raucously through his stained teeth, he strode off down the narrow way as though he did not have a care in the world. But he was doing the finest job of acting of his short career; even though, for all he really knew, he might not have any audience at all. For, inwardly, he was strung to highest tension. His sense of perception, sharply alert, was covering the full hemisphere around and above him; his mind was triggered to jerk any muscle of his body into instantaneous action.
Meanwhile, in a heavily guarded room, there sat a manlike being, faintly but definitely blue; not only as to eyes, but also as to hair, teeth, and complexion. For two hours he had been sitting at his spy ray plate, studying with ever-growing uneasiness the human beings so suddenly and so surprisingly numerously having business at the Patrol's Base. For minutes he had been studying minutely a man in a ground-cab, and his uneasiness reached panic heights.