t them in. He had testified. All the
rest of it was up to the Jury and the Court--those two enigmatic halves
of Justice and Judgment.

The point was that this was the perfect time to leave the courtroom.
When he reached his office, he could, if he wanted--and, he thought
ruefully, he probably _would_ want to, in spite of his pretended
indifference--call up to find out what the verdict had been. But, during
these few moments, all eyes were on the jury box. No one was watching
who left quietly by the side door of the big courtroom.

He moved silently and with assurance in the fractional-gee field of the
planetoid. One of the uniformed guards looked at him and smiled,
throwing him an informal salute.

The detective returned both. "If any of those news reporters ask which
way I went," he said amiably, "tell 'em I went thataway." He gestured
over his shoulder with a thumb.

"I ain't even seen you, Mr. Martin," said the guard.

The detective waved his thanks and kept going. It wasn't that he
disliked newsmen. Most of them were fairly intelligent, pleasant people.
But he didn't want to be asked any questions right now. He had given
them interviews aplenty during the trial, and they could use those, now
that the end of the trial had lifted the news ban. They had plenty of
quotations from Stan Martin without asking him what he thought of the
verdict itself.

Ten minutes later, he was in his own office in the Lloyd's Area. Helen,
his secretary, was just cutting off the phone as he walked into the
outer office. She flashed him a big smile.

"They just gave the verdict, Mr. Martin! Guilty all the way down the
line--conspiracy, extortion, kidnapping, and all the others. The only
'not guilty' verdict was a minor one. They decided that Hedgepeth wasn't
involved in the actual kidnapping itself, and therefore wasn't guilty of
the physical assault of the guard."

"They're probably right," the detective said, "but, as you said, it's a
minor point. It doesn't much matter whether he was physically present at
the time the boy was taken or not; he was certainly in on the plot." He
paused, frowning. "That's over and done with, except for a possible
appeal. And it's unlikely that that would involve us, anyway. Get Mr.
Pelham on the phone, will you? I'll take it in my office."

"The _Morton_ case?" she asked.

"Yeah. There's something fishy about the wreck of the spaceship
_Morton_, and I want Pelham to let me work on it."

He went