The trailer city was far bigger than any nearby town except Passaic. It included a score of supermarkets, all going full blast even in the middle of the night, and about as many coin-in-slot laundries, equally wide open. There were at least a hundred public baths, and close to 360 public toilets. Paige counted ten cafeterias, and twice that many hamburger stands and one arm joints, each of the stands no less than a hundred feet long; at one of these he stopped long enough to buy a "Texas wiener" nearly as long as his forearm, covered with mustard, meat sauce, sauerkraut, corn relish, and piccalilli. 'There were ten highly conspicuous hospital tents, too and after eating the Texas wiener Paige thought he knew why the smallest of them perfectly capable of homing a one ring circus.

And, of course, there were the trailers, of which Paige guessed the number at sixty thousand, from two wheeled jobs to Packards, in all stages of repair and shininess. Luckily, the city was 'cell lit, and since everyone living in it was a Believer, there were no boobytraps or other forms of proselytizing. Paige's man, after a little thoroughly elementary doubling on his tracks and setting up false trails, ducked into a trailer with a Latvian license plate. After half an hour at exactly 0200the trailer ran up a stubby VHF radio antenna as thick through as Paige's wrist.

And the rest, Paige thought grimly, climbing back on to his own rented scooter, is up to the FBI if I tell them.

But what would he say? He had every good reason of his own to stay as far out of sight of the FBI as possible. Furthermore, if he informed on the man now, it would mean immediate curtains on the search for the anti-agathic, and a gross betrayal of the trust, enforced though it had been, that Anne and Gunn had placed in him. On the other hand, to remain silent would give the Soviets the drug at the same time that Pfitzner found it in other words, before the West had it as a government. And it would mean, too, that he himself would have to forego an important chance to prove that he was loyal, when the inevitable showdown with MacHinery came around.

By the next day, however, he had hit upon what should have been the obvious course in the beginning. He took a second evening to rifle his fish's laboratory benchthe incredible idiot had stuffed it to bulging with incriminating. photomicrograph negatives, and with bits of paper bearing the symbols of a simple substitution code once circulated to Tom Mix's Square Shooters on behalf of Shredded Ralston and a third to take step-by-step photos of the hegira to the Believer trailer city, and the radiotransmitter-equipped trailer with the buffer state license. Assembling everything into a neat dossier, Paige cornered Gunn in his office and dropped the whole mess squarely in the vice-president's lap.

"My goodness," Gunn said, blinking. "Curiosity is a disease with you, isn't it, Colonel Russell? And I really doubt that even Pfitzner will ever find the antidote for that."