and a variety of other things.

It was the last word in elaborate death cells.

In the screen, Cercy could see the Ambassador sitting at a table. He
was typing on a little portable the Government had given him.

"Hey, Harrison!" Cercy called. "Might as well go ahead with Plan Two."

Harrison came out of a side room where he had been examining the
circuits leading to the Ambassador's suite. Methodically he checked
his pressure gauges, set the controls and looked at Cercy. "Now?" he
asked.

"Now." Cercy watched the screen. The Ambassador was still typing.

Suddenly, as Harrison sent home the switch, the room was engulfed in
flames. Fire blasted out of concealed holes in the walls, poured from
the ceiling and floor.

In a moment, the room was like the inside of a blast furnace.

Cercy let it burn for two minutes, then motioned Harrison to cut the
switch. They stared at the roasted room.

They were looking, hopefully, for a charred corpse.

But the Ambassador reappeared beside his desk, looking ruefully at the
charred typewriter. He was completely unsinged.

"Could you get me another typewriter?" he asked, looking directly at
one of the hidden projectors. "I'm setting down a philosophy for you
ungrateful wretches."

He seated himself in the wreckage of an armchair. In a moment, he was
apparently asleep.

* * * * *

"All right, everyone grab a seat," Cercy said. "Time for a council of
war."

Malley straddled a chair backward. Harrison lighted a pipe as he sat
down, slowly puffing it into life.

"Now, then," Cercy said. "The Government has dropped this squarely in
our laps. We have to kill the Ambassador--obviously. I've been put in
charge." Cercy grinned with regret. "Probably because no one higher up
wants the responsibility of failure. And I've selected you three as my
staff. We can have anything we want, any assistance or advice we need.
All right. Any ideas?"

"How about Plan Three?" Harrison asked.

"We'll get to that," Cercy said. "But I don't believe it's going to
work."

"I don't either," Darrig agreed. "We don't even know the nature of his
defense."

"That's the first order of business. Malley, take all our data so far,
and get someone to feed it into the Derichman Analyzer. You know the
stuff we want. What properties has X, if X can do thus and thus?"

"Right," Malley said. He left, muttering something about the
ascendancy of the physical sciences.

"Ha