"I can see that—lop off the head and the body dies," Haynes agreed.
"That's the way it works—especially when the head keeps detailed records and books covering the activities of all the members of his body. With Bominger and the others gone, and with full transcripts of his accounts, the boys mopped up Radelix in a hurry. From now on it will be simple to keep it clean, except of course, for the usual bootleg trickle, and that can be reduced to a minimum. Similarly, if we can put this Prellin away and take a good look at his ledgers, it will be easy to clear up his two hundred planets. And so on."
"Very clear, and quite simple—in theory." The older man was thoughtful and frankly dubious. "In practice, difficult in the extreme."
"But necessary," the younger insisted.
"I suppose so," Haynes assented finally. "Useless to tell you not to take chances—you'll have to—but for all of our sakes, if not for your own, be as careful as you can."
"I'll do that, chief. I think a lot of me, really. You know that story about the guy who was all right in his place, but the place hadn't been dug yet? Well, I don't want anybody digging my proper place for a long time to come."
Haynes laughed, but the concern did not leave his features. "Anything special you want done?" he asked.
"Yes, very special," Kinnison surprised him by answering in the affirmative. "You know that the Medonians developed a scrambler for a detector-nullifier. Hotchkiss and the boys developed a new line of attack on that—against long-range stuff we're probably safe—but they haven't been able to do a thing on electromagnetics. Well, the Boskonians, beginning with Prellin, are going to start wondering what has been happening. Then, if I succeed in getting Prellin, they are bound to start doing things. One thing they will do will be to fix up their headquarters so that they will have about five hundred percent overlap on their electros. Perhaps they will have outposts, too, close enough together to have the same thing there—possibly two or three hundred even on visuals."
"In that case, I would say that you'd stay out."
"Not necessarily. What do electros work on?"