king that you had been forcibly abducted
somehow--that you had been forced to write that third letter. It
certainly looked like it, since I couldn't see any reason for you to
hide anything from me.

"I didn't think you'd be in on anything as underhanded as this looked,
so I assumed that you were acting against your will."

Scholar Rawlings smiled. "But you thought I was capable of underhanded
tactics? That's not very flattering, young man."

Turnbull grinned. "I thought you were capable of kidnaping a man. Was I
wrong?"

Rawlings laughed heartily. "_Touche._ Go on."

* * * * *

"Since artifacts had been found in a part of the City from which
they had previously been removed, I thought that Jim, here, had found
a ... well, a cover-up. It looked as though some of the alien machines
were being moved around in order to conceal the fact that someone was
keeping something hidden. Like, for instance, a new weapon, or a device
that would give a man more power than he should rightfully have."

"Such as?" Duckworth asked.

"Such as invisibility, or a cheap method of transmutation, or even a new
and faster space drive. I wasn't sure, but it certainly looked like it
might be something of that sort."

Rawlings nodded thoughtfully. "A very good intuition, considering the
fact that you had a bit of erroneous data."

"Exactly. I thought that Rawlings Scientific Corporation--or else you,
personally--were concealing something from the rest of us and from the
Advisory Board. I thought that Scholar Duckworth had found out about it
and that he'd been kidnaped to hush him up. It certainly looked that
way."

"I must admit it did, at that," Duckworth said. "But tell me--how does
it look now?"

Turnbull frowned. "The picture's all switched around now. You came here
for a purpose--to check up on your own data. Tell me, is everything here
on the level?"

Duckworth paused before he answered. "Everything _human_," he said
slowly.

"That's what I thought," said Turnbull. "If the human factor is
eliminated--at least partially--from the data, the intuition comes
through quite clearly. We're being fed information."

Duckworth nodded silently.

Rawlings said: "That's it. Someone or something is adding new material
to the City. It's like some sort of cosmic bird-feeding station that has
to be refilled every so often."

Turnbull looked down at his big hands. "It never was a trade route
focus," he said