"Sure. Only I don't think we'll mention where the mama cat is hiding out. No use bogging them down with useless information. We'll tell Winston."
Scotty quirked an eyebrow. "Not suspicious of the others?"
Rick wasn't, and said so flatly. "Only the more people who know something, the more others are apt to find it out."
The scientists, however, were not even remotely interested. Their whole attention was given to the problem of getting the big radio telescope working.
Hakim Farid joined the boys long enough to say, "We've about decided the strange signals are not originating within the system. Now we're looking at the possibility that some local source is giving us interference. We thought we'd eliminated all outside noise, but perhaps something new came up after we finished checking."
Rick pointed to Cairo, visible through the control-room window. "There must be lots of stuff down there that puts out radio-frequency signals, even electric shavers and heating pads. How can you eliminate all of it?"
"We can't, in the sense of really cutting it out. But the antenna construction takes local interference into account. It's a tight beam design that should prevent overriding of the main signal by any random side effects. That's what Kerama and Winston are checking now. There's not a great deal for you to do until they're through. In a half hour we'll start to swing the antenna to see if we get an increase in the signal by a change in direction. Until then, why not take it easy?"
"We will." Rick took the opportunity to tell Farid of the incident at the museum that morning. He described briefly how they had been followed, then attacked on the museum path.
Farid frowned. "I'm sorry to hear it. Cairo is pretty law-abiding, compared to what it used to be. But we still have crime, just as you do in your big cities. You didn't lose your wallets or anything valuable?"
"Nothing. We think they were after the cat."