O'Hara was a gnome, scarcely five feet tall, with bulging eyes and wild hair that stood helter-skelter above his wrinkled face. He was staring at his desk blotter with a venomous expression, and his lower lip hung out a full half-inch. Neville stood rigidly at attention before him for a full three minutes before the old man spoke. Then he looked up and barked a caustic, "Well?"
"I am Special Investigator Neville, sir," he said, "and I want the pedigree of a certain notorious criminal whose picture is lacking in the gallery."
"Stuff and nonsense!" snorted the Colonel-General. "There is no such criminal. Man and boy, I have run this bureau since they moved it to the Moon. Why—oh, why—do they let you rookies in here to bother me?"
"Sir," said Neville stiffly, "I am no rookie. I am a...."
"Bah! We have—or had, at last night's report—eight hundred and ninety-three of your 'specials' half of them on probation. When you've spent, as I have spent, sixty-two years...."
"I'm sorry, sir," urged Neville, "we can't go into that now. Do what you want to with me afterwards, but I assure you this is urgent. I am on the trail of a higher-up in the Callisto-Trojan extortion racket. Do I get the information I am after, or do I turn in my agent badge?"
"Huh?" said the old general, sitting up and looking him straight in the face. "What's that?"
"I mean it, sir. I have trailed one of the higher-up stooges to Earth and set shadows on him. I think I have seen the king-pin of the mob, and I want to know who he is," Neville went on to describe the presentation of the showboat entertainment, with special emphasis on his hunches and suspicions. To the civilian mind, the things he told might seem silly, but to a policeman they were fraught with meaning. His description of the suspect was not one of appearance; it was a psychological description—a description based wholly on intuition and not at all on tangibles. He had not proceeded far before the wrinkled old man thumped the desk with a gnarled fist.
"Hold it," he said, "I think I know the man you mean. But give me time—my memory is not what it used to be."
Neville waited patiently at the rigid attitude of attention while the shriveled old veteran before him rocked back and forth in his chair with the lids closed over his bulging eyes, cracking his bony knuckles like castanets. O'Hara seemed to have gone into something like a trance. Suddenly, after a quiver of the eyelids, he stared up at Neville.