g its
way through the vast, tenuous dust clouds of interstellar space, came
a voice: "Are you ill, sir?"

Karnes looked up at the stewardess. "Oh. Oh, no. No, I'm all right.
Just thinking. I'm perfectly all right."

He looked at the "cigarette case" again. He knew what it was, now.
There wasn't any English word for it, but he guessed "mind impressor"
would come close.

It had done just that; impressed his mind with knowledge he should not
have; the record of something he had no business knowing.

_And he wished to Heaven he didn't!_

_This_, Karnes considered, _is a problem_. _The stuff is so_ alien!
_Just a series of things I know, but can't explain. Like a dream; you
know all about it, but it's practically impossible to explain it to
anybody else._

At the spaceport, he was met by an official car. George Lansberg, one
of the New York agents, was sitting in the back seat.

"Hi, sleuth. I heard you were coming in, so I asked to meet you." He
lowered his voice as Karnes got in and the car pulled away from the
parking lot. "How about our boy, Avery?"

Karnes shook his head. "Too late. Thirty million bucks worth of
material lost and Avery lost too."

"How come?"

"Had to kill him to keep him from getting away with these."

He showed Lansberg the microfilm squares.

"The photocircuit inserts for the new autopilot. We'd lose everything
if the League ever got its hands on these."

"Didn't learn anything from Avery, eh?" Lansberg asked.

"Not a thing." Karnes lapsed into silence. He didn't feel it necessary
to mention the mind impressor just yet.

Lansberg stuck a cigarette into his mouth and talked around it as he
lit it.

"We've got something you'll be getting in on, now that Avery is taken
care of. We've got a fellow named Brittain, real name Bretinov, who is
holed up in a little apartment in Brooklyn. He's the sector head for
that section, and we know who his informers are, and who he gives
orders to. What we don't know is who gives orders to him.

"Now we have it set up for Brittain to get his hands on some very
honest-looking, but strictly phony stuff for him to pass on to the
next echelon. Then we just sit around and watch until he does pass
it."

* * * * *

Karnes found he was listening to Lansberg with only half an ear. His
brain was still buzzing with things he'd never heard of, trying to fit
things he had always known in with things he knew now but had never