"Looks like a plug ugly," Villainowski was thinking although he was far from a beauty himself. "Ought to be a prize fighter instead of a physicist!"
"Will you pray tell me," he asked aloud of the amused Saxon, "what the hell possessed you to sneak out the night before we leave?"
Saxon grinned like a mastiff. "It was that General Atomic affair. I haven't told you, but I met one of their agents, a girl by the name of Ileth Urban, about a month ago."
"Black-headed girl?" asked the third man in the room. He had his chair leaned against the wall. A tall, angular, sandy-haired man with pale blue eyes like gimlets. "Does she have hazel-green eyes, small delicate features? Ears peaked like an animal's...."
"I hadn't noticed the ears," Saxon confessed, swinging toward the sandy-haired man.
Gavin Murdock, T.I.S. agent, had been assigned as T.I.S. representative to this first expedition beyond the Solar System. He said, "No, I guess not. She wears her hair in a page-boy bob."
Villainowski interrupted: "Well, damn it, man, who gave you permission to horn in on the T.I.S.'s work?"
"I knew her. She'd been set to pump me dry of information by General Atomic. If anyone could get anything out of her, I could."
"You don't fancy yourself much," the chief grunted with a touch of asperity. "What did you find out?"
Saxon related events just as they had transpired, omitting only the alien telepaths in the street and his own telepathic ability.