ldren might communicate with Fran without being caught at it. But
they knew. They'd produced this theory of a hovering ship of space,
broadcasting to Earth to four children hidden somewhere on it. There was
no ship. There was only Fran, desperate to perform the task he'd been
sent here to do, keeping in touch with the other three children by a
tiny unit he'd made out of scrap copper and a straw and a candle-flame.
And it was so natural that the fact wasn't guessed!

"How's he managing to eat?" asked Soames. "He's no money and next to no
English, and he doesn't know how to act...."

"He's smart!" said the security officer grimly. "He's hiding by day. At
night.... People don't usually tell the cops about a bottle of milk
missing from their doorsteps. A grocer doesn't report one loaf of bread
missing from the package left in front of his store before daybreak.
He'd pick a loaf of bread today, and a bottle of milk tomorrow.
Sometimes he'd skip. But we figured it out. We got every town in five
hundred miles to check up. Bread-truck drivers asked grocery stores. Any
bread missing? Milk-men asked their customers. Has anybody been pinching
your milk? We found where he was, in Bluevale, close to the Navajo Dam,
you know. We set cops to watch. Almost got him yesterday morning. He
was after a loaf of bread. A cop fired five shots at him, but he got
away. Dropped the loaf of bread, too."

Soames wanted to be sick. Fran was possibly fourteen years old and
desperate because his whole civilization depended on him to save them
from the destruction falling out of the sky. He was a fugitive on a
strange world.

* * * * *

Then Soames' mouth went dry as he realized. Fran had been shot at in
Bluevale, which was near the Navajo Dam. The Navajo Dam generated almost
as much electric power as Niagara.

"I had a hunch," said the security officer with some grimness, "the kid
got past three electric fences, and we don't know how. He must know
plenty about electricity. So I began to wonder if he might be hoping to
answer that broadcast signal with a signal of his own. He was in
Bluevale. We checked up. A roofer lost some sheet copper a couple of
days ago. Somebody broke in a storehouse and got away with forty or
fifty feet of heavy-gauge copper wire. A man'd have stolen the whole
roll. It would be only a kid that'd break off as much as he could carry.
See?

"He's getting set to make something, and we know he'