his luxurious hotel room Bryce checked his watch. Eight o'clock. A
telephone call was scheduled for some time in the half hour. He filed
the question of who was behind the night's attack and picked up the
phone. The dial system was in automatic contact with any city in the
world. He dialed.

Somewhere in a city, a phone rang. It rang unheard, for it was locked
into a safe in a tiny rented office with some unusual mechanisms
attached. The ringing was stopped abruptly and a recorded voice
answered, "Yeah?"

Bryce took a dial phone from the night table where it had been sitting
innocently like a toy he had bought for some child. "Hi Al," he said
cheerfully to the automatic mechanism at the other end. "Listen, I
think I've got a new phrase for that transition theme. How's this?" He
put the receiver against the back of the toy and dialed the toy dial.
It responded to each letter and number with a ringing note of
different pitch that played a short unmelodious tune.

The pitch notes went over the line and entered the mechanism, making
the contacts within it that dialed the number he had dialed on the toy
phone.

"How's that?" Bryce said cheerfully.

The recorded voice said, "Sounds good. I'll see what I can do with
it." Somewhere far away and unheard another phone had begun to ring.
"Want to speak to George?"

"Sure."

A phone rang in a pay booth somewhere in a great city railroad
station, and someone browsing at a magazine stand or sitting on a
suitcase apparently waiting for a train strolled casually to answer
it.

"Hello?" said a noncommittal voice, prepared to claim that he was
merely a stranger answering the phone because it was ringing in
public.

"Hello George, how's everything going?" Bryce asked. Those words were
his trade mark, the passwords that identified him to everyone as the
Voice who gave Tips. Among the monster organization which had grown
from the proven reliability of those tips, the voice was known as
"Hello George." Hello George's tips were always good, so they had come
to be followed as blindly as tips from God, even when they were not
understood. Certainty was one thing men in the fencing and drug
smuggling business most sorely lacked.

They communicated only by phone. They transmitted their wares by
leaving them in public lockers and mailing the key. They never saw
each other's faces or heard each other's names, but even the use of a
key could be a trap that would bring a circle of narco