Somewhere in the laboratories of Jno. Pfitzner & Sons a baby was crying.

Paige listened, blinking, until the sound was damped off. When he looked back down at the desk again, the expression of the girl behind it seemed distinctly warier.

"Look," he said. "I'm not asking a great favor of you. I don't want to know anything I shouldn't know. All I want to know is how you plan to process my packets of soil. It's just simple curiosity backed up by a trip that covered a few hundred millions of miles. Am I entitled to know for my trouble, or not?"

"You are and you aren't" the girl said steadily. "We want your samples, and we'll agree that they're unusually interesting to us because they came from the Jovian system the first such we've ever gotten. But that's no guarantee that we'll find anything useful in them."

"It isn't?"

"No. Colonel Russell, you're not the first man to come here with soil samples, believe me. Granted that you're the first man to bring anything back from outside the orbit of Mars; in fact, you're only the sixth man to deliver samples from any place farther away than the Moon. But evidently you have no idea of the volume of samples we get here, routinely. We've asked virtually every space pilot, every Believer missionary, every commercial traveler, every explorer, every foreign correspondent to scoop up soil samples for us, wherever they may go. Before we discovered ascomycin, we had to screen one hundred thousand soil samples, including several hundred from Mars and nearly five thousand from the Moon. And do you know where we found the organism that produces ascomycin? On an overripe peach one of our detail men picked up from a peddler's stall in Baltimore!"

"I see the point," Paige said reluctantly. "What's ascomycin, by the way?'

The girl looked down at her desk and moved a piece of paper from here to there. "It's a new antibiotic," she said. 'We'll be marketing it soon. But I could tell you the same kind of story about other such drugs."

"I see." Paige was not quite sure he did see, however, after all. He had heard the name Pfitzner fall from some very unlikely lips during his many months in space. As far as he had been able to determine after he had become sensitized to the sound, about every third person on the planets was either collecting samples for the firm or knew somebody who was. The grapevine, which among spacemen was the only trusted medium of communication, had it that the company was doing important government work. That, of course, was nothing unusual in the Age of Defense, but Paige bud heard enough to suspect that Pfitzner was something special something as big, perhaps, as the historic Manhattan District and at least twice as secret.

The door opened and emitted Gunn for the second time hand running, this time all the way.

"Not yet?" he said to the girl. "Evidently he isn't going to make it. Unfortunate. But I've some spare time now, Colonel"