shine.

"Except for being a little rougher, they're our own dear little
mysterious pet," Rick said. "Are they dry yet?"

Hassan passed the question on in Arabic to the workmen who had helped
make the kittens. He reported, "They okay. You can take now."

"Ask him if we can give him a present for helping us," Scotty requested.

Hassan did so, then shook his head. He grinned, his teeth white in his
pleasant black face. "He say making statues fun, not work. He help you
yesterday, so he not have to fix plaster. All even."

The boys laughed at the explanation and shook hands with the workman.

"Now," Scotty asked, "what do we do with the children?"

"One goes in my pocket," Rick replied. "I feel lost without a friendly
little feline weighing down one side of my coat. We can leave the others
here in a safe place, maybe inside one of the control cabinets."

"Good idea. Going to tell Winston and the others about this morning?"

"Sure. Only I don't think we'll mention where the mama cat is hiding
out. No use bogging them down with useless information. We'll tell
Winston."

Scotty quirked an eyebrow. "Not suspicious of the others?"

Rick wasn't, and said so flatly. "Only the more people who know
something, the more others are apt to find it out."

The scientists, however, were not even remotely interested. Their whole
attention was given to the problem of getting the big radio telescope
working.

Hakim Farid joined the boys long enough to say, "We've about decided the
strange signals are not originating within the system. Now we're looking
at the possibility that some local source is giving us interference. We
thought we'd eliminated all outside noise, but perhaps something new
came up after we finished checking."

Rick pointed to Cairo, visible through the control-room window. "There
must be lots of stuff down there that puts out radio-frequency signals,
even electric shavers and heating pads. How can you eliminate all of
it?"

"We can't, in the sense of really cutting it out. But the antenna
construction takes local interference into account. It's a tight beam
design that should prevent overriding of the main signal by any random
side effects. That's what Kerama and Winston are checking now. There's
not a great deal for you to do until they're through. In a half hour
we'll start to swing the antenna to see if we get an increase in the
signal by a change in direction. Until then, why not take it easy?"

"We wil