to song. When the Detention Building gate opened for
it, and closed again behind it, there was a welcoming committee in the
courtyard. It included a jailer with a bandaged head and a look of
vengeful satisfaction on his face, and no less than three guards who had
been given baths by a high-pressure hose when Bron Hoddan departed from
his cell. They wore unamiable expressions.

And then, while the box swore very bitterly, somebody tenderly loosened
a plank--being careful not to disturb the diplomatic seal--and pulled it
away with a triumphant gesture. Then all the police could look into the
box. And they did.

Then there was dead silence, except for the voice that came from a
two-way communicator set inside.

"_And now_," said the voice from the box--and only now did anybody
notice what the muffling effect of the boards had hidden, that it was a
speaker-unit which had sworn and coughed and sneezed--"_we take our
leave of the planet Walden and its happy police force, who wave to us as
our space-liner lifts toward the skies. The next sound you hear will be
that of their lamentations at our departure._"

But the next sound was a howl of fury. The police were very much
disappointed to learn that Hoddan hadn't been in the box, but only
one-half of a two-way communication pair, and that Hoddan had coughed
and sneezed and sworn at them from the other instrument somewhere else.
Now he signed off.

* * * * *

The space liner was not lifting off just yet. It was still solidly
aground in the center of the landing grid. Hoddan had bade farewell to
his audience from the floor of the ambassador's ground-car, which at
that moment was safely within the extra-territorial circle about the
spaceship. He turned off the set and got up and brushed himself off. He
got out of the car. The ambassador followed him and shook his hand.

"You have a touch," said the ambassador sedately. "You seem inspired at
times, Hoddan! You have a gift for infuriating constituted authority.
You should plot at your art. You may go far!"

He shook hands again and watched Hoddan walk into the lift which should
raise him--and did raise him--to the entrance port of the space liner.

Twenty minutes later the force fields of the giant landing grid lifted
the liner smoothly out to space. The twenty-thousand-ton vessel went
out to five planetary diameters, where its Lawlor drive could take hold
of relatively unstressed space. There