rom his
superiors. As a matter of fact, the more men he could command, the fewer
he could use on anything that could be construed as concerning Lonnie.

Equipment, though, was a little different matter. There was usually
enough so that one unit of a kind could be unobtrusively trained on Mr.
Raichi under the care of Jason's own desk sergeant. In 1999, for
example, Moglaut, that erratic and secretive genius in Physlab Nine,
came out with a quantum analyzer and probability reproducer. The machine
installed in Pol-Anx, reconstructed crimes and identified the probable
criminals by their modus operandi and the physical traces they couldn't
avoid leaving at the un-mercy of any of its portable data accumulators.

On Jason's first attempt it almost came close to Lonnie. It did gather
in the hidden, dead, still twitching, completely uncommunicative
carcasses of the five men who actually relieved the vault of the
Citizen's Bank of Berlin of its clutch of millions. It even identified
the body of the rocopilot found floating in the Potomac a few days later
as being one of the group, and the killer. It did _not_ locate the
arsonized remnants of the plane, though, nor the currency; and only
achieved the casting of a slight, or subsidiary, third-hand aspersion in
the direction of THE Launcelot Raichi.

But Lonnie came up with an irrefutable alibi, somehow, and the hassle
that followed made Jason's luck run out. And on Jason's stubborn,
secret, subsequent tries, all the analyzer could produce was a report of
zero data whenever Jason, reasonably or unreasonably, believed that
Lonnie was involved.

Every time.

Zero data when Schicklehitler's marshal's baton disappeared from the
British Museum.

[Illustration: _Lonnie on his dream throne ... Jason at his instruments.
Was the struggle endless between these two?_]

Zero data when Charlemagne's Crown lapsed unobtrusively from its shrine
in Vienna during the Year 2000 Celebration.

Subsequently, Jason realized that the Berlin job in 1999 had marked
Lonnie's last essay after money. Other things seemed to occupy Lonnie's
mind after he'd sprouted publicly into the status of full-fledged,
hyper-respectable, inter-planetary business tycoon; complete with a
many-tentacled industrial organization in Moon Colony and a far-flung
prospecting unit headquartering at Mars Equatorial.

Tycoonship was a status with which Everyone Who Mattered was always
pleased.

Jason's next attempt on Lonnie