reason why they should suspect. They should think that
the man coming in was one of their own. The radio contact between the
men outside had been limited to a few micromilliwatts of
power--necessarily, since radio waves of very small wattage can be
decoded at tremendous distances in open space. The men inside the
planetoid certainly should not have been able to pick up any more than
the beginning of the early conversation before it had been cut
completely off by the intervening layers of solid rock.

The chamber he entered was a high-speed airlock. Unlike the soundless
discharge of his special gun in the outer airlessness, the blast of air
that came into the waiting chamber was like a hurricane in noise and
force. The room filled with air in a very few seconds.

The detective held on to the handholds tightly while the brief but
violent winds buffeted him. He turned as the inner door opened.

His eyes took in the picture in a fraction of a second. In an even
smaller fraction, his mind assimilated the picture.

The woman was dark-haired, dark-eyed, and muscular. Her mouth was wide
and thick-lipped beneath a large nose.

The man was leaner and lighter, bony-faced, and beady-eyed.

The woman said: "Fritz, what--?"

And then he shot them both with gun number two.

No needle charges this time. Such shots would have blown them both in
two, unprotected as they were by spacesuits. The small handgun merely
jangled their nerves with a high-powered blast of accurately beamed
supersonics. While they were still twitching, he went over and jabbed
them with a drug needle.

Then he went on into the hideout.

He had to knock out one more man, whom he found asleep in a small room
off the short corridor.

It took a gas bomb to get the two women who were guarding the kid.

He made sure that the BenChaim boy was all right, then he went to the
little communications room and called for help.

_[12]_

St. Louis hadn't been hit during the Holocaust. It still retained much
of the old-fashioned flavor of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
especially in the residential districts. The old homes, some of them
dating clear back to the time of Sam Clemens and the paddle-wheel
steamboat, still stood, warm and well preserved.

Bart Stanton liked to walk along those quiet streets of an evening, just
to let the placid peacefulness seep into him.

And, knowing it was rather childish, he still enjoyed the small
Huckleberry F