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pavement before the coffee shop. Two uniformed policemen hastened, hand at holster, through the doorway with glances that took in everyone, anything or person capable of harm, activity and/or motion—and most particularly those who might be able to in any fashion, wise or manner whatsoever draw a weapon of their own.
    "Over here," Lars said, heavily. He disliked this, but the Soviet authorities were behaving idiotically. How could they expect to approach him like this, openly, in a public place? Rising, he held his restraining writ out to the first of the two-man team of police.
    "This person," he said, indicating the elderly Peep-East official who sat frowning, drumming nervously with his fingers against his briefcase, "is in contempt of the Superior Court of Queens County, Department Three. I'd like him arrested. My attorney will ask that charges be pressed. I'm supposed to tell you that," he said. He waited while the two policemen studied the writ.
    "All I want to know," the elderly Soviet official said plaintively, "is part 76, your number. What does it refer to?"
    He was led off. At the doorway the two silent ultra-neat, fashionable, cod-eyed young men who had accompanied him pursued his retreating figure but made no move to interfere with the actions of the city police. They were unemotional and resigned.
    "All in all," Pete said presently as he sat down again, "it wasn't too messy." He grimaced, however.
    Clearly he hadn't enjoyed it. "Ten will get you twenty he's from the embassy."
    "Yes," Lars agreed. Undoubtedly from the USSR Embassy, rather than the SeRKeb. He had been given instructions and had sought only to carry them out, to satisfy his superiors. They were all on that ratwheel. The encounter hadn't been pleasant to the Soviets, either.
    "Funny they were so interested in 265," Pete said. "We haven't had any trouble with it. Who do you suppose on your staff is working for KACH? Is it worth having the FBI check them over?"
    "There isn't a chance in the world," Lars said, "that the FBI or CIA or anybody else in the business could pry loose the KACH-man on our staff. You know that. What about the one at Lanferman Associates? I saw shots of your mockups." He had of course known that anyhow. What bothered him was not the verification that KACH had someone at Mr. Lars, Incorporated—that Peep-East knew as much about his output as he did about Miss Topchev's—but that something ailed item 265. Because he had favored that. He had followed it through its several stages with interest. The prototype, down in Lanferman's almost endless subsurface chambers, was being tested this week.
    Tested, anyhow, in one sense.
    But if he let himself dwell on that long enough, he would have to abandon his profession. He did not blame Jack Lanferman and certainly not Pete. Neither of them made the rules or defined the game. Like himself they sat passive, because this was the law of life.
    And in the subsurface chambers that linked Lanferman Associates of San Francisco with their "branch" in Los Angeles—actually merely the south end of the titanic underground network of the organization itself—item 265, the Evolution Gun (a hastily scrawled screed of a title, in the trade deprived of durability by adding the term working to it), this superweapon snatched from the puzzling realm which the weapons-mediums groped about in, would see what the pursaps liked to think of as—action.
    Some ersatz gross victim, susceptible of being expanded, would be treated to a swat from item 265. And all this would be caught by the lenses of the media, the mags, the books, the 'papes, the TV, everything except helium-filled blimps towing red neon signs.
    Yes, Lars thought; Wes-bloc could add that to its repertory of media by which the pursaps are kept both pure and saps. Something that lights up ought to cross the nighttime sky very slowly, or, as in former times, sputter unendingly around and around the turret of a skyscraper, edifying the public to the