ith the bulks of research-centers and the red roofs of the villages.

"Kato, I think I know how we're going to find out which one it is," he
said. "First of all, you write up your data, and falsify it so that it
won't do any damage if it gets into Komintern hands. And then--"

* * * * *

The next day started in an atmosphere of suppressed excitement and
anxiety, which, beginning with MacLeod and Karen and Kato Sugihara,
seemed to communicate itself by contagion to everybody in the MacLeod
Team's laboratories. The top researchers and their immediate assistants
and students were the first to catch it; they ascribed the tension under
which their leader and his wife and the Japanese labored to the recent
developments in the collapsed-matter problem. Then, there were about a
dozen implicitly-trusted technicians and guards, who had been secretly
gathered in MacLeod's office the night before and informed of the crisis
that had arisen. Their associates could not miss the fact that they were
preoccupied with something unusual.

They were a variegated crew; men who had been added to the Team in every
corner of the world. There was Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman, the Arab jeep-driver
who had joined them in Basra. There was the wiry little Greek whom
everybody called Alex Unpronounceable. There was an Italian, and two
Chinese, and a cashiered French Air Force officer, and a Malay, and the
son of an English earl who insisted that his name was Bertie Wooster.
They had sworn themselves to secrecy, had heard MacLeod's story with a
polylingual burst of pious or blasphemous exclamations, and then they
had scattered, each to the work assigned him.

MacLeod had risen early and submitted to the ordeal of the search to
leave the reservation and go to town again, this time for a conference
at the shabby back-street cigar store that concealed a Counter Espionage
center. He had returned just as Farida Khouroglu was finishing the
microfilm copies of Kato's ingeniously-concocted pseudo-data. These
copies were distributed at noon, while the Team was lunching, along with
carbons of the original type-script.

He was the first to leave the table, going directly to the basement,
where Alex Unpronounceable and the man who had got his alias from the
works of P. G. Wodehouse were listening in on the telephone calls going
in and out through the Team-center switch-board, and making recordings.
For two hours, MacLeod remained with t