Paul Brennan's reaction was a disappointment to himself. He neither felt
great relief nor the desire to exult. He found himself assaying his own
calmness and wondering why he lacked emotion over this culmination of so
many years of futile effort. He re-read the letter carefully to see if
there were something hidden in the words that his subconscious had
caught, but he found nothing that gave him any reason to believe that
this letter was a false lead. It rang true; Brennan could understand Tim
Fisher's stated reaction and the man's desire to collect. Brennan even
suspected that Fisher might use the reward money for his own private
purpose.

It was not until he read the letter for the third time that he saw the
suggestion to move with caution and secrecy not as its stated request to
protect the writer, but as an excellent advice for his own guidance.

And then Paul Brennan realized that for six years he had been
concentrating upon the single problem of having James Holden returned to
his custody, and in that concentration he had lost sight of the more
important problem of achieving his true purpose of gaining control of the
Holden Educator. The letter had not been the end of a long quest, but
just the signal to start.

Paul Brennan of course did not give a fig for the Holden Estate nor the
welfare of James. His only interest was in the machine, and the secret of
that machine was locked in the young man's mind and would stay that way
unless James could be coerced into revealing it. The secret indubitably
existed as hardware in the machine rebuilt in the house on Martin's Hill,
but Brennan guessed that any sight of him would cause James to repeat his
job of destruction. Brennan also envisioned a self-destructive device
that would addle the heart of the machine at the touch of a button,
perhaps booby-traps fitted like burglar alarms that would ruin the
machine at the first touch of an untrained hand.

Brennan's mind began to work. He must plan his moves carefully to acquire
the machine by stealth. He toyed with the idea of murder and rejected it
as too dangerous to chance a repeat, especially in view of the existence
of the rebuilt machine.

Brennan read the letter again. It gave him to think. James had obviously
succeeded in keeping his secret by imparting it to a few people that he
could either trust or bind to him, perhaps with the offer of education
via the machine, which James and only James maintained in hiding c