d as a lever. When he was through, he was convinced that he knew
exactly who the culprit was.

Oh, he didn't know the name of the man, or men, who had actually
committed the crime. Those things were, for the moment, relatively
unimportant. The police might find them, but that could wait. The thing
that _was_ important was that Bending was certain within his own mind
who had paid to have the lab robbed.

Not that he could make any accusations to the police, of course. That
wouldn't do at all. But _he_ knew. He was quite certain.

He left the lab itself and went into the outer rooms, the three rooms
that constituted the clients' waiting room, his own office, and the
smaller office of Nita Walder, the girl who took care of his files and
correspondence.

A quick look told him that nothing in the offices had been disturbed. He
shrugged his huge shoulders and sat down on the long couch in the
waiting room.

_Much good it may do them_, he thought pleasantly. _The Converter won't
be worth the stuff it's made of if they try to open it._

He looked at the clock on the wall and frowned. It was off by five
hours. Then he grinned and looked at his wrist watch. Of course the wall
clock was Off. It had stopped when the power had been cut off. When the
burglars had cut the leads to the Converter, everything in the lab had
stopped.

It was eight seventeen. Sam Bending lit a cigarette and leaned back to
wait for the cops. United States Power Utilities, Monopolated, had
overstepped themselves this time.

* * * * *

_Bending Consultants_, as a title for a business, was a little
misleading because of the plural ending of the last word. There was only
one consultant, and that was Samson Francis Bending. His speciality was
the engineering design of atomic power plants--both the old fashioned
heavy-metal kind and the newer, more elegant, stellarators, which
produced power by hydrogen-to-helium conversion.

Bending made good money at it. He wasn't a millionaire by any means, but
he had enough money to live comfortably on and enough extra to
experiment around on his own. And, primarily, it had always been the
experimentation that had been the purpose of Bending Consultants; the
consulting end of the business had always been a monetary prop for the
lab itself. His employees--mostly junior engineers and engineering
draftsmen--worked in the two-story building next door to the lab. Their
job was to make mo