Dr Urth looked disappointed. ‘Dear me, Inspector. I keep hoping you will see the answer. Really, you have had so many hints.’

Davenport drew in a slow, firm breath. It went hard, but his voice was calm and even once more. ‘Will you tell me what you have in mind, Doctor?’

Dr Urth patted his comfortable abdomen with one hand and replaced his glasses. ‘Don’t you see, Inspector, that there is one place on board a spaceship where secret numbers are perfectly safe? Where, although in plain view, they would be perfectly safe from detection? Where though they were being stared at by a hundred eyes, they would be secure? Except from a seeker who is an astute thinker, of course.’

‘Where? Name the place!’

‘Why, in those places where there happen to be numbers already. Perfectly normal numbers. Legal numbers. Numbers that are supposed to be there.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The ship’s serial number, etched directly on the hull. On the hull, be it noted. The engine number, the field generator number. A few others. Each etched on integral portions of the ship. On the ship, as the silicony said. On the ship.’

Davenport’s heavy eyebrows rose with sudden comprehension. ‘You may be right – and if you are, I’m hoping we find you a silicony twice the size of the Robert Q. ‘s. One that not only talks, but whistles, ‘Up, Asteroids, Forever!’’ He hastily reached for the dossier, thumbed rapidly through it and extracted an official T.B.I. form. ‘Of course, we noted down all the identification numbers we found.’ He spread the form out. ‘If three of these resemble coordinates . . . ’

‘We should expect some small effort at disguise,’ Dr Urth observed. ‘There will probably be certain letters and figures added to make the series appear more legitimate.’

He reached for a scratch pad and shoved another toward the Inspector. For minutes the two men were silent, jotting down serial numbers, experimenting with crossing out obviously unrelated figures.

At last Davenport let out a sigh that mingled satisfaction and frustration. ‘I’m stuck,’ he admitted. ‘I think you’re right; the numbers on the engine and the calculator are clearly disguised coordinates and dates. They don’t run anywhere near the normal series, and it’s easy to strike out the fake figures. That gives us two, but I’ll take my oath the rest of these are absolutely legitimate serial numbers. What are your findings, Doctor?’

Dr Urth nodded. ‘I ctgree. We now have two coordinates and we know where the third was inscribed.’

‘We know, do we? And how – ’ The Inspector broke off and uttered a sharp exclamation. ‘Of course! The number on the very ship itself, which isn’t entered here – because it was on the precise spot on the hull where the meteor crashed through – I’m afraid there goes your silicony, Doctor.’ Then his craggy face brightened. ‘But I’m an idiot. The number’s gone, but we can get it in a flash from Interplanetary Registry.’

‘I fear,’ said Dr Urth, ‘that I must dispute at least the second part of your statement. Registry will have only the ship’s original legitimate number, not the disguised coordinate to which the captain must have altered it.’

‘The exact spot on the hull,’ Davenport muttered. ‘And because of that chance shot the asteroid may be lost forever. What use to anybody are two coordinates without the third?’

‘Well,’ said Dr Urth precisely, ‘conceivably of very great use to a two-dimensional being. But creatures of our dimensions,’ he patted his paunch, ‘do require the third – which I fortunately happen to have right here.’

‘In the T.B.I. dossier? But we just checked the list of numbers—’

‘’Your list, Inspector. The file also includes young Vemadsky’s original report. And of course the serial number listed there for the Roben Q. is the carefully faked one under which she was then sailing-no point in rousing the curiosity of a repair mechanic by letting him note a discrepancy.’

Davenport reached for a scratch pad and the Vemadsky list. A moment’s calculation and he grinned.

Dr Urth lifted himself out of the chair with a pleased puff and trotted to the door. ‘It is always pleasant to see you, Inspector Davenport. Do come again. And remember the government can have the uranium, but I want the important thing: one giant silicony, alive and in good condition.’

He was smiling.

‘And preferably,’ said Davenport, ‘whistling.’

Which he was doing himself as he walked out.

Each an Explorer

Herman Chouns was a man of hunches. Sometimes he was right; sometimes he was wrong-about fifty-fifty. Still, considering that one has the whole universe of possibilities from which to pull a right answer, fifty-fifty begins to look pretty good.

Chouns wasn’t always as pleased with the matter as might be expected. It put too much of a strain on him. People would huddle around a problem, making nothing of it, then tum to him and say, ‘What do you think, Chouns? Tum on the old intuition.’

And if he came up with something that fizzled, the responsibility for that was made clearly his.

His job, as field explorer, rather made things worse.

‘Think that planet’s worth a closer look?’ they would say. ‘What do you think, Chouns?’

So it was a relief to draw a two-man spot for a change (meaning that the next trip would be to some low-priority place, and the pressure would be off) and, on top of it, to get Allen Smith as partner.

Smith was as matter-of-fact as his name. He said to Chouns the first day out, ‘The thing about you is that the memory files in your brain are on extraspecial call. Faced with a problem, you remember enough little things that maybe the rest of us don’t come up with to make a decision. Calling it a hunch just makes it mysterious, and it isn’t.’

He rubbed his hair slickly back as he said that. He had light hair that lay down like a skull cap.

Chouns, whose hair was very unruly, and whose nose was snub and a bit off-center, said softly (as was his way), ‘I think maybe it’s telepathy.’

‘What!’

‘Nuts!’ said Smith, with loud derision (as was his way). ‘Scientists have been tracking psionics for a thousand years and gotten nowhere. There’s no such thing: no precognition; no telekinesis; no clairvoyance; and no telepathy.’

‘I admit that, but consider this. If I get a picture of what each of a group of people are thinking – even though I might not be aware of what was happening – I could integrate the information and come up with an answer. I would know more than any single individual in the group, so I could make a better judgment than the others – sometimes.’

‘Do you have any evidence at all for that?’

Chouns turned his mild brown eyes on the other. ‘Just a hunch.’

They got along well. Chouns welcomed the other’s refreshing practicality, and Smith patronized the other’s speculations. They often disagreed but never quarreled.

Even when they reached their objective, which was a globular cluster that had never felt the energy thrusts of a human-designed nuclear reactor before, increasing tension did not worsen matters.

Smith said, ‘Wonder what they do with all this data back on Earth. Seems a waste sometimes.’

Chouns said, ‘Earth is just beginning to spread out. No telling how far humanity will move out into the galaxy, given a million years or so. All the data we can get on any world will come in handy someday.’

‘You sound like a recruiting manual for the Exploration Teams. Think there’ll be anything interesting in that thing?’ He indicated the visiplate on which the no-longer distant cluster was centered like spilled talcum powder.

‘Maybe. I’ve got a hunch – ’ Chouns stopped, gulped, blinked once or twice, and then smiled weakly.

Smith snorted. ‘Let’s get a fix on the nearest stargroups and make a random pass through the thickest of it. One gets you ten, we find a McKomin ratio under 0.2.’

‘You’ll lose,’ murmured Chouns. He felt the quick stir of excitement that always came when new worlds were about to be spread beneath them. It was a most contagious feeling, and it caught hundreds of youngsters each year. Youngsters, such as he had been once, flocked to the Teams, eager to see the worlds their descendants someday would call their own, each an explorer-

They got their fix (made their first close-quarters hyperspatial jump into the cluster, and began scanning stars for planetary systems. The computers did their work; the information files grew steadily, and all proceeded in satisfactory routine-until at system 23, shortly after completion of the jump, the ship’s hyperatomic motors failed.

Chouns muttered, ‘Funny. The analyzers don’t say what’s wrong.’

He was right. The needles wavered erratically, never stopping once for a reasonable length of time, so that no diagnosis was indicated. And, as a consequence, no repairs could be carried through.

‘Never saw anything like it,’ growled Smith. ‘We’ll have to shut everything off and diagnose manually.’