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He was never sure just how long the process took but it was certainly not more than a second or two. Afterwards, he just sat there, staring.

From far across the unimaginable depths of the galaxy, fighting its way through the vast, tenuous dust clouds of interstellar space, came a voice: “Are you ill, sir?”

Karnes looked up at the stewardess. “Oh. Oh, no. No, I’m all right. Just thinking. I’m perfectly all right.”

He looked at the “cigarette case” again. He knew what it was, now. There wasn’t any English word for it, but he guessed “mind impressor” would come close.

It had done just that; impressed his mind with knowledge he should not have; the record of something he had no business knowing.

And he wished to Heaven he didn’t!

This, Karnes considered, is a problem. The stuff is so alien! Just a series of things I know, but can’t explain. Like a dream; you know all about it, but it’s practically impossible to explain it to anybody else.

At the spaceport, he was met by an official car. George Lansberg, one of the New York agents, was sitting in the back seat.

“Hi, sleuth. I heard you were coming in, so I asked to meet you.” He lowered his voice as Karnes got in and the car pulled away from the parking lot. “How about our boy, Avery?”

Karnes shook his head. “Too late. Thirty million bucks worth of material lost and Avery lost too.”

“How come?”

“Had to kill him to keep him from getting away with these.”

He showed Lansberg the microfilm squares.

“The photocircuit inserts for the new autopilot. We’d lose everything if the League ever got its hands on these.”

“Didn’t learn anything from Avery, eh?” Lansberg asked.

“Not a thing.” Karnes lapsed into silence. He didn’t feel it necessary to mention the mind impressor just yet.

Lansberg stuck a cigarette into his mouth and talked around it as he lit it.

“We’ve got something you’ll be getting in on, now that Avery is taken care of. We’ve got a fellow named Brittain, real name Bretinov, who is holed up in a little apartment in Brooklyn. He’s the sector head for that section, and we know who his informers are, and who he gives orders to. What we don’t know is who gives orders to him.

“Now we have it set up for Brittain to get his hands on some very honest-looking, but strictly phony stuff for him to pass on to the next echelon. Then we just sit around and watch until he does pass it.”

* * * * *

Karnes found he was listening to Lansberg with only half an ear. His brain was still buzzing with things he’d never heard of, trying to fit things he had always known in with things he knew now but had never known before. Damn that “cigarette case”!

“Sounds like fun,” he answered Lansberg.

“Yeah. Great. Well, here we are.” They had driven to the Long Island Spaceways Building which also housed the local office.

They got out and went into the building, up the elevator, down a corridor, and into an office suite.

Lansberg said: “I’ll wait for you here. We’ll get some coffee afterwards.”

The redhead behind the front desk smiled up at Karnes.

“Go on in; he’s expecting you.”

“I don’t know whether I ought to leave you out here with Georgie or not,” Karnes grinned. “I think he has designs.”

“Oh, goodie!” she grinned back.

My, my aren’t we clever! His thought was bitter, but his face didn’t show it.

Before he went in, he straightened his collar before the wall mirror. He noticed that his plain, slightly tanned face still looked the same as ever. Same ordinary gray-green eyes, same ordinary nose.

Chum, you look perfectly sane. You are perfectly sane. But who in hell would believe it?