ck
into complete integration, away from Nagor, into a medley of heroic
Petes with gleaming eyes and clutching hands and good little Alices
pushing them away--for the moment.

"But surely you can find out through the girl," Nagor insisted from
far away, almost out of phase altogether.

"No, Pete!" Alice Hendricks said aloud.

"Riuku, you're the only one of us with any possible sort of contact.
You've got to find out, if we're to stay here at all."

"Well," Alice Hendricks thought, "maybe...."

Riuku cursed her again, in the lingua franca of a dozen systems.
Nagor's voice faded. Riuku switched back to English.

* * * * *

Saturday. Into the plant at 3:58. Jean's diamond again.... _Wish it
would choke her; she's got a horsey enough face for it to. Where's old
Liverlips? Don't see him around. Might as well go to the restroom for
a while...._

That's it, Riuku thought. Get her over past the machine shop, over by
that Restricted Area. There must be something there we can go on....

"Hello, Tommy," Alice Hendricks said. "How's the love life?"

"It could be better if someone I know would, uh, cooperate...."

She looked past him, toward the corner where the big panels were with
all the dials and the meters and the chart that was almost like the
kind they drew pictures of earthquakes on. What was it for, anyway?
And why couldn't anyone go over to it except those longhairs? High
voltage her foot....

"What're you looking at, Alice?" Tommy said.

"Oh, that." She pointed. "Wonder what it's for? It doesn't look like
much of anything, really."

"I wouldn't know. I've got something better to look at."

"Oh, _you_!"

Compared to Pete, he didn't have anything, not anything at all.

... _Pete. Gee, he must have got home awful late last night. Wonder
what Susan said to him. Why does he keep taking her lip, anyway?_

Riuku waited. He prodded. He understood the Restricted Area as she
understood it--which was not at all. He found out some things about
the 731 plugs--that a lot of them were real crummy ones the fool day
shift girls had set up wrong, and besides she'd rather solder on the
717's any day. He got her talking about the weapon again, and he found
out what the other girls thought about it.

Nothing.

Except where else could you get twelve-fifty an hour soldering?

She was stretched out on the couch in the restroom lobby taking a
short nap--on company time, old Liverlips being