loud. "And why should
I be thinking in English?" When her words registered on her ears, she
realized that she was actually _speaking_ in English. She was thoroughly
acquainted with the language, of course, but it was not normal for her to
think in it unless she happened to be conversing with someone in that
tongue.

The first whisper of a suspicion began to take form in the mind of Dr.
Sonya Borisovna Malekrinova.

Half a block away, Raphael Poe emptied the last of his breadcrumbs on the
sidewalk and began walking away. He kept his mind as blank as possible,
while his brow broke out in a cold sweat.

* * * * *

"That," said Colonel Julius Spaulding scathingly, "is as pretty a mess as
I've seen in years."

"It's a breadboard circuit, I'll admit," Dr. Davenport said defensively,
"but it's built according to the schematics you gave us."

"Doctor," said the colonel, "during the war the British dropped our group
a radio transmitter. It was the only way to get the stuff into Africa
quickly. The parachute failed to open. The transmitter fell two thousand
feet, hit the side of a mountain, and tumbled down another eight hundred
feet. When we found it, four days later, its wiring was in better shape
than that thing is in now."

"It's quite sufficient to test the operation of the device," Davenport
said coldly.

Spaulding had to admit to himself that it probably was. The thing was a
slapdash affair--the colonel had a strong feeling that Davenport had
assigned the wiring job to an apprentice and gave him half an hour to do
the job--but the soldering jobs looked tight enough, and the components
didn't look as though they'd all been pulled out of the salvage bin. What
irritated Colonel Spaulding was Davenport's notion that the whole thing
was a waste of time, energy, money, and materials, and, therefore, there
was no point in doing a decent job of testing it at all.

He was glad that Davenport didn't know how the information about the
device had been transported to the United States. As it was, he considered
the drawings a hoax on the part of the Russians; if he had been told that
they had been sent telepathically, he would probably have gone into fits
of acute exasperation over such idiocy.

The trouble with Davenport was that, since the device didn't make any
sense to him, he didn't believe it would function at all.

"Oh, it will do _something_, all right," he'd said once, "but it won't b