There he is!" he said irritably. "I banged him pretty hard. I don't
like to hate anybody, but the way he fought----"

Sally's teeth chattered suddenly. She called to one of the security men
standing guard by the stretchers.

"I--think my--father is going to want to talk to him," she said
unsteadily. "Don't--let him be taken away to the hospital until Dad
knows, please."

She started away, her face dead-white and her hand stone-cold.

"What's the matter?" demanded Joe.

"S-sabotage," said Sally in an indescribable tone that had a suggestion
of heartbreak.

She went into her father's office alone. She came out again with him,
and her father looked completely stricken. Miss Ross, his secretary, was
with him, too. Her face was like a mask of marble. She had always been a
plain woman, a gloomy one, a morbid one. But at the new and horrible
look on her face Joe turned his eyes away.

Then Sally was crying beside him, and he put his arm clumsily around her
and let her sob on his shoulder, completely puzzled.

He didn't find out until later what the trouble was. The man who'd tried
so earnestly to kill him was Miss Ross's fiance. She had met this man
during a vacation, as a government secretary, and he was a refugee with
an exotic charm that would have fascinated a much more personable and
beautiful woman than Miss Ross. They had a whirlwind romance. He
confided to her his terror of emissaries from his native country who
might kill him. And of course she was more fascinated still. When he
asked her to marry him she accepted his proposal. Then, just two weeks
before her assignment to the Space Platform project, he vanished. Miss
Ross was desperate and lovesick.

One day her telephone rang and his anguished voice told her he'd been
abducted, and if she told the police he would be tortured to death. He
begged her not to do anything to cause him more torment than was already
his.

She'd been trying to keep him alive ever since. Once, when she couldn't
bring herself to carry out an order she'd been given--with threats of
torment to him if she failed--she'd received a human finger in the mail,
and a scrawled and blood-stained note which cried out of unspeakable
torment and begged her not to doom him to more.

So Miss Ross, who was Major Holt's secretary and one of his most trusted
assistants, had been giving information to one group of saboteurs all
the while. She was the most dangerous security leak in the whole
Platfo