houghtful brown eyes. He put a large brief case on the
floor, and, after the preliminaries were over, he came right to the point.

"Colonel Spaulding, I spoke to the Secretary of Defense, and he agreed
that perhaps this situation might be cleared up if I talked directly with
you."

"I hope so," the colonel said. "Just what is it that seems to be bothering
you?"

"These drawings," Davenport said, "don't make any sense. The device
they're supposed to represent couldn't do anything. Look; I'll show you."

He took from his brief case photostatic copies of some of the drawings
Lenny had made. Five of them were straight blueprint-type drawings; the
sixth was a copy of Lenny's near-photographic paintings of the device
itself.

"This component, here," he said, gesturing at the set of drawings, "simply
baffles us. We're of the opinion that your agents are known to the Soviet
government and have been handed a set of phony plans."

"What's it supposed to do?" Lenny asked.

"We don't know what it's _supposed_ to do," the scientist said, "but it's
doubtful that it would _actually_ do anything." He selected one of the
photocopies. "See that thing? The one shaped like the letter Q with an
offset tail? According to the specifications, it is supposed to be painted
emerald green, but there's no indication of what it is."

* * * * *

Lenny Poe reached out, picked up the photocopy and looked at it. It
was--or had been--an exact copy of the drawing that was used by Dr. Sonya
Malekrinova. But, whereas the original drawing has been labeled entirely
in Cyrillic characters, these labels were now in English.

The drawings made no sense to Lenny at all. They hadn't when he'd made
them. His brother was a scientist, but Lenny understood none of it.

"Who translated the Russian into English?" he asked.

"A Mr. Berensky. He's one of our best experts on the subject. I assure you
the translations are accurate, Dr. Davenport said.

"But if you don't know what that thing is," the colonel objected, "how
can you say the device won't work? Maybe it would if that Q-shaped thing
was--"

"I know what you mean," Davenport interrupted. "But that's not the only
part of the machine that doesn't make any sense."

He went on to explain other discrepancies he had detected in the drawings,
but none of it penetrated to Lenny, although Colonel Spaulding seemed to
be able to follow the physicist's conversation fairly readil