. He was in his
second-story sleeping-room. There was a door in the wall ahead,
leading into the room Leithgow was accustomed to use on his visits,
and there the papers should be. But first he would have to have light.

His ears pitched for any betraying sound, Carse moved heavily to his
left until a wall arrested him. He felt along it, located the desk he
sought for and scoured through it. His fingers found the flash he knew
was there.

The darkness then was slit by a hard straight line of white. It shot
over the room picking out overturned chairs, a bowl that had toppled
to the floor, scattering its contents of ripe akalot fruit, a sleeping
couch, its sheets and pillows awry, and--something human.

A half-clothed body lay sprawled beside the couch, its hands thrust
clutching forward and its unseeing eyes still staring at the door
whence had come the shots that had burnt out the left side of its
chest. Dead. Three days dead. The murdered master of the house, Kurgo,
lying where Ku Sui's robot-coolies had shot him down.

The Venusian-smell swept more strongly into his nostrils as the
adventurer opened the door into Leithgow's room. No Venusian had ever
been in those rooms _before_ the abduction.

Carse's light danced over the room's confusion: a laboratory table
overturned; apparatus spilled; several chains flung around, one
splintered: mute signs of the struggle Eliot Leithgow had offered his
kidnappers.

In a corner stood a metal chest. In the bottom drawer was the
all-significant answer. Hawk Carse crossed the room and slid it open.

The papers were gone!

* * * * *

Methodically Carse hunted through every drawer and corner of the room,
but he found no trace of them. Every article that would be of value to
an ordinary thief was left; the one thing important to Dr. Ku Sui, the
sheaf of papers, was missing.

The presence of the Venusian body-smell started an important train of
thought in the Hawk's mind. It signified that the papers had been
taken by henchmen of Ku Sui, which in turn signified that Ku Sui had
survived the crashing of the dome and was alive and again aggressively
dangerous. But was the Eurasian already on Satellite III? Was he
already in personal possession of the papers?--perhaps conducting a
search for Leithgow's laboratory?

Or did it mean that Dr. Ku had merely radioed instructions for his
Venusian henchmen to ransack the house, take whatever pertained to