as told.

There were two of them at the door, both wearing the uniform of
Carlson Spacecraft. Plant protection squad.

"Who are you, bud?" asked the heavy-jawed one who had spoken before.
"And whataya doin' here?"

Karnes, keeping his hands high, said: "Take my billfold out of my hip
pocket."

"Okay. But first get over against that wall and lean forward."
Evidently the man was either an ex-cop or a reader of detective
stories.

* * * * *

When Karnes had braced himself against the wall, the guard went
through his pockets, all of them, but he didn't take anything out
except the pistol and the billfold.

The card in the special case of the wallet changed the guard's manner
amazingly.

"Oh," he said softly. "Government, huh? Gee, I'm sorry, sir, but we
didn't know--"

Karnes straightened up, and put his hands down. The cigarette case
that had been in his right hand all along dropped into his coat
pocket.

"That's all right," he said. "Did you see the lad at the foot of the
stairs?"

"Sure. Jim Avery. Worked in Assembly. What happened to him?"

"He got in the way of the bullet. Resisting arrest. He's the jasper
that set off the little incendiaries that started that mess out there.
We've been watching him for months, now, but we didn't get word of
this cute stroke until too late."

The guard looked puzzled. "Jim Avery. But why'd he want to do that?"

Karnes looked straight at him. "Leaguer!"

The guard nodded. You never could tell when the League would pop up
like that.

Even after the collapse of Communism after the war, the world hadn't
learned anything, it seemed. The Eurasian League had seemed, at first,
to be patterned after the Western world's United Nations, but it
hadn't worked out that way.

The League was jealous of the UN lead in space travel, for one thing,
and they had neither the money nor the know-how to catch up. The UN
might have given them help, but, as the French delegate had remarked:
"For what reason should we arm a potential enemy?"

After all, they argued, with the threat of the UN's Moonbase hanging
over the League to keep them peaceful, why should we give them
spaceships so they can destroy Moonbase?

The Eurasian League had been quiet for a good many years, brooding,
but behaving. Then, three years ago, Moonbase had vanished in a flash
of actinic light, leaving only a new minor crater in the crust of
Luna.

There was no proof of anything,