end of one of the more intricate mazes in the Pentagon Building. Neither wore a uniform but the younger man called the other sir, or chief, or general.

"We've established definitely that Sergeant Cort was on that train, have we?" the general asked.

"Yes, sir. No doubt about it."

"And he has the item with him?"

"He must have. The only keys are here and at the other end. He couldn't open the handcuff or the brief case."

"The only known keys, that is."

"Oh? How's that, General?"

"The sergeant can open the brief case and use the item if we tell him how."

"You think it's time to use it? I thought we were saving it."

"That was before Superior defected. Now we can use it to more advantage than any theoretical use it might be put to in the foreseeable future."

"We could evacuate Cort. Take him off in a helicopter or drop him a parachute and let him jump."

"No. Having him there is a piece of luck. No one knows who he is. We'll assign him there for the duration and have him report regularly. Let's go to the message center."

Senator Bobby Thebold was an imposing six feet two, a muscular 195, a youthful-looking 43. He wore his steel-gray hair cut short and his skin was tan the year round. He was a bachelor. He had been a fighter pilot in World War II and his conversation was peppered with Air Force slang, much of it out of date. Thebold was good newspaper copy and one segment of the press, admiring his fighting ways, had dubbed him Bobby the Bold. The Senator did not mind a bit.

At the moment Senator Thebold was pacing the carpet in the ample working space he'd fought to acquire in the Senate Office Building. He was momentarily at a loss. His inquiries about Jen Jervis had elicited no satisfaction from the ICC, the FBI, or the CIA. He was in an alphabetical train of thought and went on to consider the CAA, the CAB and the CAP. He snapped his fingers at CAP. He had it.

The Civil Air Patrol itself he considered a la-de-da outfit of gentleman flyers, skittering around in light planes, admittedly doing some good, but by and large nothing to excite a former P-38 pilot who'd won a chestful of ribbons for action in the Southwest Pacific.

Ah, but the PP. There was an organization! Bobby Thebold had been one of the founders of the Private Pilots, a hard-flying outfit that zoomed into the wild blue yonder on week ends and holidays, engines aroar, propellers aglint, white silk scarves aflap. PP's members were wealthy industrialists, stunt flyers, sportsmen—the elite of the air.

PP was a paramilitary organization with the rank of its officers patterned after the Royal Air Force. Thus Bobby Thebold, by virtue of his war record, his charter membership and his national eminence, was Wing Commander Thebold, DFC.

Wing Commander Thebold swung into action. He barked into the intercom: "Miss Riley! Get the airport. Have them rev up Charger. Tell them I'll be there for oh-nine-fifty-eight take-off. Ten-hundred will do. And get my car."

Charger was Bobby the Bold's war surplus P-38 Lightning, a sleek, twin-boomed two engine fighter plane restored to its gleaming, paintless aluminum. Actually it was an unarmed photo-reconnaissance version of the famous war horse of the Pacific, a fact the wing commander preferred to ignore. In compensation, he belted on a .45 whenever he climbed into the cockpit.

Thebold got onto Operations in PP's midwestern headquarters in Chicago. He barked, long distance:

"Jack Perley? Group Captain Perley, that is? Bobby, that's right. Wing Commander Thebold now. We've got a mission, Jack. Scramble Blue Squadron. What? Of course you can; this is an emergency. We'll rendezvous north of Columbus—I'll give you the exact grid in half an hour, when I'm airborne. Can do? Good-o! ETA? Eleven-twenty EST. Well, maybe that is optimistic, but I hate to see the day slipping by. Make it eleven-forty-five. What? Objective? Objective Superior! Got it? Okay—roger!"

Wing Commander Bobby Thebold took his Lindbergh-style helmet and goggles from a desk drawer, caressing the limp leather fondly, and put them in a dispatch case. He gave a soft salute to the door behind which Jen Jervis customarily worked, more as his second-in-command than his secretary, and said half aloud:

"Okay, Jen, we're coming to get you."

He didn't know quite how, but Bobby the Bold and Charger would soon be on their way.

Don Cort regretfully detached himself from Alis Garet.

"What was that?" he said.

"That was me—Alis the love-starved. You could be a bit more gallant. Even 'How was that?,' though corny, would have been preferable.

"No—I mean I thought I heard a voice. Didn't you hear anything?"

"To be perfectly frank—and I say it with some pique—I was totally absorbed. Obviously you weren't."

"It was very nice." The countryside, from the edge to the golf course, was deserted.

"Well, thanks. Thanks a bunch. Such enthusiasm is more than I can bear. I have to go now. There's an eleven o'clock class in magnetic flux that I'm simply dying to audit."

She gave her shoulder-length blonde hair a toss and started back. Don hesitated, looked suspiciously at the brief case dangling from his wrist, shook his head, then followed her. The voice, wherever it came from, had not spoken again.

"Don't be angry, Alis." He fell into step on her left and took her arm with his free hand. "It's just that everything is so crazy and nobody seems to be taking it seriously. A town doesn't just get up and take off, and yet nobody up here seems terribly concerned."

Alis squeezed the hand that held her arm, mollified. "You've got lipstick on your whiskers."

"Good. I'll never shave again."

"Ah," she laughed, "gallantry at last. I'll tell you what let's do. We'll go see Ed Clark, the editor of the Sentry. Maybe he'll give you some intelligent conversation."

The newspaper office was in a ramshackle one-story building on Lyric Avenue, a block off Broadway, Superior's main street. It was in an ordinary store front whose windows displayed various ancient stand-up cardboard posters calling attention to a church supper, a state fair, an auto race, and a movie starring H. B. Warner. A dust-covered banner urged the election as president of Alfred E. Smith.

There was no one in the front of the shop. Alis led Don to the rear where a tall skinny man with straggly gray hair was setting type.

"Good morning, Mr. Clark," she said. "What's that you're setting—an anti-Hoover handbill?"

"Hello, Al. How are you this fine altitudinous day?"

"Super. Or should it be supra? I want you to meet Don Cort. Don, Mr. Clark."

The men shook hands and Clark looked curiously at Don's handcuff.

"It's my theory he's an embezzler," Alis said, "and he's made this his getaway town."

"As a matter of fact," Don said, "the Riggs National Bank will be worried if I don't get in touch with them soon. I guess you'd know, Mr. Clark—is there any communication at all out of town?" By prearrangement, a message from Don to Riggs would be forwarded to Military Intelligence.

"I don't know of any, except for the Civek method—a bottle tossed over the edge. The telegraph and telephone lines are cut, of course. There is a radio station in town, WCAV, operated from the campus, but it's been silent ever since the great severance. At least nothing local has come over my old Atwater Kent."

"Isn't anybody doing anything?" Don asked.

"Sure," Clark said. "I'm getting out my paper—there was even an extra this morning—and doing job printing. The job is for a jeweler in Ladenburg. I don't know how I'll deliver it, but no one's told me to stop so I'm doing it. I guess everybody's carrying on pretty much as before."

"That's what I mean. Business as usual. But how about the people who do business out of town? What's Western Union doing, for instance? And the trucking companies? And the