"Don't I know you, mister?" he said. His soft voice carried a note of authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. "Sure you do, Jess. It's been a while, though."
The policeman got to his feet. "Jimmy," he said, "Jimmy Tremaine." He came to the counter and put out his hand. "How are you, Jimmy? What brings you back to the boondocks?"
"Let's go somewhere and sit down, Jess."
In a back room Tremaine said, "To everybody but you this is just a visit to the old home town. Between us, there's more."
Jess nodded. "I heard you were with the guv'ment."
"It won't take long to tell; we don't know much yet." Tremaine covered the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission produced not one but a pattern of "fixes" on the point of origin. He passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
"I think what we're getting is an echo effect from each of these points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction pattern—"
"Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I'll take your word for it."
"The point is this, Jess: we think we've got it narrowed down to this section. I'm not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter's near here. Now, have you got any ideas?"