Welcome nodded, unsurprised. What he wanted was the knowledge of theoretical and applied genetics which made such studies possible in the first place.

  Biological engineering—designing any life-form whatsoever, and creating it by controlled mutation! Perhaps Man himself becoming superman—at the very least, losing the inherited weaknesses which dragged him down and shadowed his life and ultimately killed him. This could mean more than the scientific revolution that began with Galileo had yet offered.

  Only it hardly seemed fair of the Inyahunans to demand everything Earth knew in exchange. They were welcome to the null-null drive, the energy converter, and the magnetronic tube. When they also asked for instruction in such things as mathematical sociology, supercomputer theory and practice and industrial catalysis, it was going too far. Their culture didn’t need all that information. They could only want it for purposes of selling to someone else—underselling Earth, maybe. Welcome and Orazuni had been bargaining for a whole week now.

  “We’d have to send a good-sized technical mission to Procyon to teach you all this,” said the Australian. “It would be hard to find enough top-rank men in all those fields who’d want to be gone so many years on an alien planet; we’d have to pay them fantastic salaries. And the equipment they’d need! Really, Freeman Orazuni, you must be reasonable. I think I could add a course in advanced metal crystallography to what I’ve already offered you. That would help you with a good many construction problems. But then, naturally, we’d want you to give us your chemical-probe technique in return.”

  “In addition to the genetic theory and the tables of constants?” protested Orazuni. “Do you wish to ruin us, Freeman Welcome? What will our poor race be able to trade for further information?”

  “Your own biological technology. You can’t have worked out genetics as thoroughly as you have without a good background in biochemistry, histology, and I don’t know what else.” The human put the tips of his fingers together and peered over the bridge they formed. “After all, we do have some good biologists on Earth, too, you know. We could work all this out for ourselves in time. The very knowledge that such things are possible is a long step forward.”

  “As for that,” shrugged Orazuni gracefully, “we could send students to Earth who could consult your books and journals—”

  “It would be of limited value without the help of men who’ve had practical experience,” said Welcome. “I’m afraid your people wouldn’t even know what to look for.”

  He left the rest of it unspoken, though it was plain to both of them: Now that the civilized planets had gotten on to the idea of Horse Trading, they weren’t going to be particularly cooperative toward casual students from outside. It wasn’t a question of censorship; an effective barrier was imposed by the fact that there was no material trade to speak of between the stars. How could a visitor pay for his stay and education? He had to be financed by his hosts. And he could only earn such a scholarship as a reward for his planet’s having offered a similar one to the other world.

  They bargained in a gentlemanly fashion for a while longer, Orazuni dipping into his portfolio from time to time—he never released it, and there were rumors that he slept with it—for some tantalizing sample of information. Welcome in turn threw out remarks concerning the value of nuclear energy and high-strength alloys. The human found himself wishing that he knew more about Inyahuna’s culture. They were a polite but reserved people—one might almost say secretive.

  It went well today, though. Orazuni seemed much more amenable than he had been yesterday, and at the close of the discussion there was almost complete agreement.

  “I think we can wind this up tomorrow,” said Welcome. “I repeat my offer of throwing in a course in quantum theory of resonance bonds as applied to alloys. Think it over.”

  “I must discuss it with my group,” replied Orazuni, “but I think they will consider the terms fair. Frankly, I would like to return soon with my wives. Our children will be nearly grown by the time we get home. If you would make arrangements to have the Messenger depart in a week or so—”

  “Well, all right.” Welcome balanced the factors in his mind. He’d have to round up all the instructors and other experts he had on tap to go to Procyon, alert the ship’s people, arrange clearance. But a week should be enough. The other Inyahunans would remain to take posts at one of Earth’s universities. “Wouldn’t you like to visit around in the Solar System for a few months first, though? It seems a shame for you to come all this way without seeing much more than Luna.”

  “No, thank you. My people are not given to tourism.” Orazuni got up to go. “Oh, by the way, if you will pardon my returning to a painful subject—I am curious. What is so unusual about this robbery, apart from the circumstances?”

  “Well, the fact that an electronic lock was opened. It’s not supposed to be possible without a key.” As Orazuni arched his hairless brows, Welcome explained: “The lock has no keyhole. It’s held by a magnetronic field clamping two plates together with a force of several thousand tons, the field being generated by the circulation of an electronic current in several Cheval tubes. The whole thing is also wired in to an alarm circuit which goes off at any attempt to tamper. The key is actually a self-powered tube creating a heterodyning field. Since a literal infinity of wave-combinations is possible, there should be no chance of anyone’s using a variable key to fumble the lock open.”

  “I see. I thought it was something on that order.” Orazuni nodded and stroked his chin. “Do you know, if the crime was not committed by the Sirians themselves—or, if you will pardon me, by a human—then it seems logical that the guilty party should have a very advanced knowledge of electronics.”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Cybernetics?” murmured Orazuni. He bowed. “Well, I will not intrude further on your time. Good day, Freeman Welcome.”

  He left.

  When he was gone, the human stood thinking for a long while. Small complicated circuits—Arcturus? Rappapa seemed like a pleasant little chap, but you never knew.

  He sighed and looked out the window. The slow Lunar dawn was breaking incandescently over the jagged airless horizon and blazing into his eyes.

  “Nice day,” he muttered bitterly.

  M’Gamba called up a few minutes later. “We found the book,” he said.

  “Eh?” Welcome’s long body jerked forward.

  “Lying in a corner of Shop Number Seven. Anybody could have left it there. We gave it back to the Sirians, but they weren’t very polite about it.”

  Welcome shrugged. “I don’t blame them. Obviously the thief took photomicrographs of the book and got rid of the thing itself away after he was done with it. Now all we have to find is a packet consisting of a few one-inch-square films. Hell, he could have swallowed ’em.”

  “And grabbed himself a whole technology without paying Vega for it. I guess George is hopping mad too, though you can’t tell. He gives me the crawlies.”

  “The devil with that. We’ve got to find the burglar to clear ourselves. Been through the apartments?”

  “All but the Sirians and George. The Sirians wouldn’t hear of it, and it’d be impossible to make a decent search in a place conditioned to New Jupiter. Nothing. Not a thing.”

  Welcome bit his lip, then blurted out his suspicions of Arcturus.

  The police captain nodded. “Sounds pretty reasonable.”

  “I took Rappapa for a dinkum cobber, but—well, we can’t trust anybody, can we? Rig some traps. Try to fluoro him and his bunch without their knowing it. Go through their suite again with an electronic probe. Try anything.”

  “All jets,” said M’Gamba glumly, and clicked off.

  The intercom buzzed. “The envoy Helmung dur Brogu-Almerik, planet Alpha Centauri A III, to see you, Freeman Welcome,” said Christine in a mechanical voice.

  “On top of everything else,” groaned the Australian. “All right, send him in.” The door flew open. A nine-foot giant stamped in, thumping the butt of his spear on the floor, his chain mail jangling and his sword clanking. He was fairly humanoid, except for a blue skin, a tail, and antennae above his small slant eyes, but the battered face was tattooed in a ferocious pattern of red and yellow. If it hadn’t been for several exploration parties from Earth, which had maintained a more or less permanent liaison with the clan chief of Brogu, this visit—or visitation—would never have happened. But the barbarians had heard news of the Horse Traders and insisted on getting into the game, and in the interests of peace, the last expedition had brought this delegate back. And sloughed him off on me! thought Welcome with resentment.

  “How do you do, Freeman Helmung?” the Earthman said very softly. The Centaurian’s head looked immensely high above him.

  “Quiet, I will speak!” The walls rattled.

  “Just as you wish.” Welcome extended the customary box of cigars. Health hadn’t reported this race as allergic to tobacco, but he hoped maliciously that Helmung would be.

  The giant grabbed a handful, popped them into his mouth, and chewed noisily. “Not bad,” he said, sprawling into a chair. He swallowed, spat on the floor, and cocked his spurred feet up on the desk. “I am Helmung dur Brogu-Almerik. Look on me and be afraid.” It seemed a ritual greeting, for he added in a more friendly tone: “You may call me Skull-smasher.”

  “Ah, yes, to be sure.” Welcome sat down on the other side of the desk. “I trust you have been enjoying your stay?”

  “Not enough fights. No females big enough. That Orazuni, he is good sort and gives me much drink, otherwise you can hialamar them all.” Welcome did not inquire what it was to hialamar, though he could make a shrewd guess. “I am great sorcerer. I have much vingutyr.”

  “You have much everything,” agreed Welcome hastily.

  “Vingutyr is—is what I have much of. That is why I am great sorcerer.” The gravelly bass paused for a thunderous belch. “I shall show you how to wish your enemies dead. You shall show me how make ships-that-fly. Then we shall sack many worlds.”

  “Well, really, I say now—” Welcome had a sudden sense of futility. “There just isn’t much witchcraft on Earth these days.”

  “I knew you was backward peoples!” cried Helmung triumphantly. “Look, dance of death, begins this way.” He jumped up, waving his spear, and began to prance around, chanting.

  “Isn’t there something about making a doll and sticking pins in it?” asked Welcome weakly.

  “Old-fashioned. Brogu is modern peoples. My father, top witch in Almerik, study from Earthmen. Learn about laws of science. He go on to figure laws of witchcraft.” Helmung ticked off the points on his fingers, and Welcome realized that he must, after all, be his race’s equivalent of an intellectual. “Law of likes-make-likes. Law of luck. Law of—”

  “Now hold on, please do.”

  Welcome riffled through his papers till he found the memo on Alpha Centauri submitted by the preliminary investigators, which, in the madhouse today, he hadn’t had time to read. Confound it, the barbarian must have something worth the time of a division chief! He skimmed rapidly down, the sheet and stopped at a paragraph referring to a limited degree of telekinesis as a congenital talent. The phenomenon was almost nonexistent among humans, and the parapsychology boys wanted Helmung humored so they could study him in detail.

  Welcome thought of the Centaurian tossing boulders through the air by pure will-power, and shuddered.

  “I understand,” he began cautiously, “that you can move things merely by wishing them to move.”

  “Well, little things,” said Helmung deprecatingly. “Not very big. Powerful wish-mover back home was showed game called dice by Earthmen. He won much treasure from them. But he had be much powerful to move dice.”

  “I see.”

  Welcome suppressed an impulse to mop his brow. He wasn’t very well briefed on modern parapsych theory, but he remembered vaguely that telekinesis was attributed to a linkage between the neural field and the local sub-electronic fluxes. If that was so, you wouldn’t expect the nervous system to have enough energy output to lift anything massive. Still, it would be interesting to watch.

  “Do you mind if I try you?” he asked. “I’ve never seen this before.”

  “Is little thing,” said Helmung scornfully. “Why not ask me wish-kill somebody for you?”

  “Some other time,” said Welcome. He went over to a cabinet in which he kept testing equipment and took out an oscilloscope. When he had a steady sine wave on it, he gestured with one hand. “Can you change that wiggly shape there?” he asked.

  “Easy,” grunted Helmung. “Orazuni told me about little things, too small to see.”

  “Yes. As a biologist, he’d naturally be interested in TK, too. Never mind, go ahead, if you please.”

  Helmung scowled in concentration. The electron trace jerked wildly, slithered across the screen, and began shaping itself into obscene drawings. Welcome hastily shut off the scope.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “That’s just beautiful.”

  Helmung rubbed his hands with a businesslike air. “Now how you build ships-that-fly?”

  “I don’t think you would be really interested in that,” said Welcome as tactfully as possible.

  Helmung’s tail lashed against his ankles. He leaned across the desk, grabbed the human by the scruff of the neck, lifted him up, and shook him.

  “So Brogu witchcraft not good enough for you, hah?”

  “Yowp!” Welcome was near choking when Helmung set him down.

  “I am patient man,” rumbled the barbarian, “but you show me how build ships, or—”

  “Now look, Skull-smasher,” said Welcome shakily. “Really, I’d like to, you know, but I’m not the boss here. I can’t tell you myself. You see—uh—well, on Earth our witches still believe in the dolls-and-pins theory. Also, to build spaceships you’d need tools you don’t have, even if you knew how. Why don’t you think it over for a while? We could show you lots of other things. For instance, you know what an alloy is? Well, we can tell you how to make better alloys than you now have. Unbreakable swords and so on. Why not start with that and work up?”

  “Might be,” grumbled Helmung, taking a thoughtful bite off another cigar.

  “Oh, and ways to brew firewater, perhaps,” added Welcome.

  He winked, and Helmung guffawed, and presently the interview ended in a spirit of good fellowship. When the broad mailed back had gone out the door, Welcome made a dash for a three-starred bottle.

  He thumbed the intercom switch.

  “Come on in, Chris,” he said. “I think we both need a drink.”

  Two hours later, Welcome was pretty sure he had tracked down the thief.

  The time had been devoted to hard thinking and to study of the files on the four possible planets, sent up from the Division of Biopoliticology. Four planets, because you could eliminate Helmung immediately, and Welcome was sure enough of his own staff to feel certain that no human, even in a fit of greed or planetarism, had snaffled the book. Furthermore, you had to bear in mind that none of the delegates could have known in advance that a theft would be possible. They could not have made elaborate preparations beforehand for the job, but must have used whatever means were available to them, more or less on impulse. That argued for the burglar’s having the technology to pick an electronic lock even if he had never seen one before.

  That also ruled out Procyon at once. Enough was known of their science to make it quite certain that they lagged behind Earth in such matters as control circuits. Vega—you couldn’t be sure just what George did or did not have at his disposal, but the fact that he had come here in the first place to get some of mankind’s electronic and magnetronic knowledge pretty well proved that he couldn’t have done the crime. Why should he steal his own book, anyway? New Jupiter wasn’t much interested in interstellar intercourse or in setting up its own Horse Traders.

  It was also a safe bet that Sirius did not know how to open the lock without a key. To be sure, Thevorakz did have such an instrument, and he might well have faked the crime to discredit Earth in the eyes of other races. But the psychology reports, while not conclusive, did make that line of thought seem improbable. The Dominators weren’t that subtle.

  By elimination—Arcturus. Welcome sighed and called M’Gamba’s office. “Anything new?”

  “We’re working along,” said the policeman. “We’ve had every human who was on the fourth sub-level last night, at the party or on duty elsewhere, under deep hypnosis—total recall. By piecing together all their accounts, we’ve shown that every member of the Procyonite and the Arcturian delegations was seen by somebody all the time until the party broke up and the Sirians went home. In other words; there’s not a chance that any of them could have done it. There are blank spots as far as the rest are concerned, though.”

  “Arcturus, eh?” Welcome frowned. “Do you have anything else on them?”

  “Well, we have been snapping fluoros at the Arcturian ducks on the sly, as you suggested. You know those little pouches they wear around their necks, to carry things in? One of their party—Srnapopoi, the name is—is carrying around a packet of microfilms. But it can’t be the film, can it?”

  “Can’t it?” Welcome showed his teeth in a humorless grin. “Look, Captain, a circuit technology as highly developed as theirs should be able to crack the electronic lock.”