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would give himself away by reacting to sounds a native would ignore.
    His hands and feet were widened to accommodate an additional finger or toe, and control of these was contrived for him through a process of nerve splitting that seemed miraculous to Darzek but was considered commonplace by his surgeon.
    And there were other changes. The surgeon, working from projections of Kammian natives, made numerous minor alterations the way a portrait painter might make final finishing touches: a slight elongation of the eyes, a minute widening of the nostrils, the corners of the mouth turned up, the blond, naturally curly hair darkened and straightened, the color of his irises altered from blue to brown, all mammalian traces excised from his chest. Darzek had to learn to chew with a slight sideways motion, to spit out of the side of his mouth, and to control his tongue. Since the Kammians had no speech, their tongues were much less mobile than those of humans. Sticking out one’s tongue on Kamm was more than a breach of propriety; it was a violation of the physiologically impossible.
    Darzek knew that Kamm was called the Silent Planet, but he had not contemplated the implications of life on a world where no life form could hear. He was completely unprepared when Kom Rmmon showed him projections of Kammian natives fluttering their twelve fingers with unbelievable rapidity. When finally he had been convinced that the finger movements actually constituted speech, he considered calling the project off.
    “Any sensible life form would have learned to read lips,” he complained.
    Kom Rmmon pointed out that reading the lips of an alien life form speaking an utterly alien language was likely to be as difficult as learning to read a finger language, and Darzek sat back resignedly and watched the projection. His crash educational program was just beginning.
    “But keep it to the absolute essentials,” he warned Kom Rmmon sternly. “I haven’t time for a graduate degree in Kammian culture.”
    Long before his training was completed, he had a report from the space monitors that ringed the sector in which Kamm was located. These recorded a spectrum of information about every ship that passed within light-years, and this information had been compared with logs of ships known to have been in the sector. There were no unknowns. Every ship entering that sector of space was in fact a governmental ship on a governmental mission. No alien civilization had brought a pazul to Kamm.
    Darzek read the report twice. “So,” he mused, “the Kammians did it themselves. The problem now is to find out what it is.”
    * * * *
    The Department of Uncertified Worlds maintained an underground base on the largest of Kamm’s five diminutive moons. The base provided storage and laboratory facilities for the use of Kammian agents. Jan Darzek saw it only briefly. He stepped through a transmitter frame on the Department of Uncertified Worlds supply ship and stepped out of a receiver frame in the moon base. Then he skipped aside; a moment later, supply cartons cascaded after him, and an automatic conveyor moved them away.
    Darzek wandered about the base and was not surprised to find it deserted. Agents would visit it only on brief errands. Their work had to be done on the planet, and there never were enough of them to do it properly.
    He decided not to wait for chance to provide him with an escort. The moon surface transmitter had a dozen destination settings, but only six were listed as bases on the island of Storoz, the center of activity for Synthesis agents. One of those had been crossed off. Darzek punched the setting for Storoz Base I, the acceptance light flashed, and he asked himself what he had to lose and stepped through to the world of Kamm.
    He emerged in a musty-smelling, totally dark room. He shouted; there was no response. He took two steps, and his hands encountered a damp dirt wall. Again a shout brought no response. He turned and fumbled in the