"Might I offer a barely tenable suggestion?" Nadreck asked diffidently.
"I'll say you can—come in."
"Judging by the rate at which Lyranians have been vanishing of late, it would seem that we would not have to wait too long before another one comes hither under her own power. Since the despised ones will have captured her themselves, and themselves will have forced her to come to them, no suspicion will be or can be aroused."
"That's a thought, Nadreck—that is a thought!" Kinnison applauded. "Shoot us up, will you, Hen? 'Way up, and hover over the center of the spread of intersections of those lines. Put observers on every plate you've got here—you, too, Captain Craig, please, all over the ship. Have half of them search the air all around as far as they can reach for an airplane in flight; have the rest comb the terrain below, both on the surface and underground, with spy-rays, for any sign of a natural or artificial cave."
"What kind of information do you think they may have, Kinnison?" asked Tregonsee the Rigellian.
"I don't know." Kinnison pondered for minutes. "Somebody—around here somewhere—has got some kind of a tie-up with some Boskonian entity or group that is fairly well up the ladder; I'm pretty sure of that. Bleeko sent ships here—one speedster, certainly, and there's no reason to suppose that it was an isolated case—"
"There is nothing to show, either, that it was not an isolated case," Tregonsee commented quietly, "and the speedster landed, not up here near the pole, but in the populated zone. Why? To secure some of the women?" The Rigellian was not arguing against Kinnison; he was, as they all knew, helping to subject every facet of the matter to scrutiny.
"Possibly—but this is a transfer point," Kinnison pointed out. "Illona was to start out from here, remember. And those two ships—coming to meet her, or perhaps each other, or—"
"Or perhaps called there by the speedster's crew, for aid," Tregonsee supplied the complete thought.
"One but quite possibly not both," Nadreck suggested. "We agreed, I think, that the probability of a Boskonian connection is sufficiently large to warrant the taking of these Overlords alive in order to read their minds?"