the time the sandy beaches of
a cape appeared, it was quite convincingly a private plane bringing
someone from a residential island to the airport of Kandar City. If a
small object trailed below it, barely above the waves, suspended by the
thinnest of wires, it was invisible. If the plane happened to be on a
course that would pass above a spot north-northeast from the tip of the
cape, a spot calculated from information given by Talents, Incorporated,
it seemed entirely coincidental. Nobody could have suspected anything
unusual; certainly nothing likely to upset the plans of a murderous
totalitarian enemy. One small and insignificant civilian plane shouldn't
be able to prevent the murder of a space-fleet, a king and the most
resolute members of a planet's population!

Captain Bors flew the ship. The official pilot used an electron camera,
giving a complete and overlapping series of pictures of the shore five
miles away with incredible magnification and detail.

The magnetometer-needle flicked over. Its findings were recorded. As
the plane went on it returned to a normal reading for fifty fathoms of
seawater.

Half an hour later the seemingly private plane landed at the capital
airport. Another half-hour, and its record and pictures were back at the
air base, being examined and computed by hungry-eyed men.

Just as the pretty Morgan girl had said, there was a shack on the very
tip of the cape. It was occupied by two men. They loafed. And only an
electron camera could have used enough magnification to show one man
laughing, as if at something the other had said. The camera proved--from
five miles away--that there was no sadness afflicting them. One man
laughed uproariously. But the rest of the planet was in no mood for
laughter.

The magnetometer recording showed that a very large mass of magnetic
material lay on the ocean bottom, fifty fathoms down. Minute
modifications of the magnetic-intensity curve showed that there was
electronic machinery in operation down below.

Bors made no report to the palace. King Humphrey was a conscientious and
doggedly resolute monarch, but he was not an imaginative one. He would
want to hold a cabinet meeting before he issued orders for the
destruction of a space-ship that was only technically and not actually
an enemy. Kandar had received an ultimatum from Mekin. An answer was
required when a Mekinese fleet arrived off Kandar. Until that moment
there was, in theory, no war. But, in