bvious that he couldn't have been in China." He
chuckled, but there was no mirth in it. "So the cold war still
continues. We know what they did, and--in a way--they know what we did.
But not how we did it."

The senator looked at the other two men who were with him on the fifth
floor office of the _Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research_.
Taggert was relaxing on his couch, and Spencer Candron, just out of the
hospital, looked rather pale as he sat in the big, soft chair that
Taggert had provided.

The senator looked at Candron. "The thing I don't understand is, why was
it necessary to knock out Ch'ien? He'll have a sore jaw for weeks. Why
didn't you just tell him who you were and what you were up to?"

Candron glanced at Taggert, but Taggert just grinned and nodded.

"We couldn't allow that," said Candron, looking at Senator Kerotski.
"Dr. James Ch'ien has too much of a logical, scientific mind for that.
We'd have ruined him if he'd seen me in action."

The senator looked a little surprised. "Why? We've convinced other
scientists that they were mistaken in their observations. Why not
Ch'ien?"

"Ch'ien is too good a scientist," Candron said. "He's not the type who
would refuse to believe something he saw simply because it didn't agree
with his theories. Ch'ien is one of those dangerous in-betweens. He's
too brilliant to be allowed to go to waste, and, at the same time, too
rigid to change his manner of thinking. If he had seen me teleport or
levitate, he wouldn't reject it--he'd try to explain it. And that would
have effectively ruined him."

"Ruined him?" The senator looked a little puzzled.

Taggert raised his heavy head from the couch. "Sure, Leo," he said to
the senator. "Don't you see? We _need_ Ch'ien on this interstellar
project. He absolutely _must_ dope out the answer somehow, and no one
else can do it as quickly."

"With the previous information," the senator said, "we would have been
able to continue."

"Yeah?" Taggert said, sitting up. "Has anyone been able to dope out
Fermat's Last Theorem without Fermat? No. So why ruin Ch'ien?"

"It would ruin him," Candron broke in, before the senator could speak.
"If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and
teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as
usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his
scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to
explain what he saw. W