from the river shore
opposite the cove."

The agent got up and turned down the stove as the coffee began to
percolate. "My tale is pretty short."

"Wag it, anyway," Rick suggested.

Steve put a hand to his forehead. "Gags like that at this time of day
cause shooting pains. Please be attentive, and not waggish."

"Ouch!" Scotty exclaimed.

Steve sat down again. "After you were safely on your way I changed to
dark clothes, smeared a little black goo on my face, and took off for
Calvert's Favor. I drove to within a half mile and parked the car in the
woods, then hiked. The first thing I came to was a chain-link fence. It
took some time to see if it was wired for an alarm--and it was. So I had
to find a tree with a limb that overhung the fence. I'd taken the
precaution of carrying a rope. I found the tree, fixed the rope to an
overhanging limb, and down I went."

"We could have postponed recovering the payload and helped you," Scotty
said reproachfully.

"Sure you could. But I'm used to operating alone, and I was interested
in what you might find in the cove. Anyway, I approached from behind the
barn and had to take cover when two men went by. They had rifles. They
headed down the peninsula toward the cove. I scouted around, but no
other guards were in sight, so I started with the barn."

Steve paused. "That is quite a barn. No hay, no oats, no horses. But it
has the loveliest dish antenna in it you've ever seen."

"A microwave dish?" Rick gasped.

"Exactly. It's mounted on a truck, and I suspect the electronic gear is
inside. I couldn't get a good look. There are also little cubicles
inside the barn, probably horse stalls, and I could hear a man snoring
in one of them. There wasn't much light, and I couldn't use my little
flashlight beam too freely, but I did get a look at several gas bottles
racked along one wall. They were big ones, of the kind used for
commercial gases like propane or oxygen."

"Or hydrogen?" Scotty asked quickly.

"Or hydrogen," Steve agreed. "And that's probably what they contain, for
inflating the balloons."

He got up, turned off the coffee, and poured three cups. "Along about
that time, I heard rifleshots. You can imagine what I thought. I had a
vision of two bodies sinking slowly into the mud. If I'd had a weapon, I
think I'd have run down to see what was going on. But common sense got
the better of me, and I figured it was highly unlikely that a pair of
divers could be picked off