Words tumbled from the hotel clerk, anxious, shaken: “Are you hurt? Did you—Still, lie still, here comes a doctor—”

Pain curled Goram’s lips back from his teeth, but he muttered reply: “No…I’m all right…flesh wound—”

The doctor bent over his bloody form. “Deep,” he said, “but it missed the important veins. Here I’ll just pull it out—”

“Go ahead,” whispered Goram. “I’ve taken worse than this, though…I never expected it here.”

Heym lay on the floor while they worked over the soldier. His ringing, whirling head throbbed toward steadiness, and slowly, with so tremendous an impact that it overloaded his nerves and entered his consciousness without emotional shock, the realization grew.

Goram had spoken to the natives—in their own language.

A man bent over the psychologist “Are you all right?” he asked. “I’m sorry I had to hit you so hard. Here—drink this.”

Heym forced the liquid down his throat. It coursed fierily through his veins, he sat up with an arm supporting him about his waist and held his head in his hands.

Someone else spoke, the voice seemed to come from across an abyss: “Did he hear?”

“I’m afraid so.” Goram, his neck bandaged, spoke painfully. A rueful smile crossed his ugly face. “The excitement was too much for me, or I would have kept silent. This is going to be—inconvenient.”

The men of the planet helped Heym into a chair. He began to revive, and looked dazedly across at the man he had tried to kill. The others stood around the chairs, tall bearded men in barbaric dress, watching him with alertness and a strange pity.

“Yes,” said Tamman Goram very quietly, “the assistant Grand Marshal of the Solarian Empire is a native of Station Seventeen.”

“Who else?” whispered Heym. “How and why? I tried to kill you because I thought you meant to order the planet sterilized.”

“It was an act,” said Goram. “I meant to concede at last that the station was harmless and could be safely left to the Foundation’s observers. Coming from one who had apparently been strongly inclined to the opposite view, the statement would have been doubly convincing to Imperial officialdom. It was a powerful and suspicious minister who ordered the investigation, and I went to soothe his feelings. His successor will be one of our men, who will see that Station Seventeen drops into safe obscurity as an unimportant and generally unsuccessful experiment conducted by a few harmless cranks.”

“But…aren’t you…weren’t you—”

“Oh, yes. My history is perfectly genuine. I was planted as an obscure recruit in the border guards many years ago, and since then my rise has been strictly in accord with Imperial principles. All our men in the Empire will bear the most searching investigation. Sometimes they come from families which have lived several generations on Imperial planets. Our program of replacing key personnel with our men is planned centuries ahead of time, and succeeds by the simple fact that on the average, over long periods of time, they are so much more capable than anyone else.”