Page:Amazing Stories Volume 16 Number 06.djvu/160

160 you were Shane's closest friend. You were found trying to enter the offices of a group of Martian espionage agents with whom Sergeant Shane had some connections. We are holding you indefinitely!"

I started to open my mouth in further protest, then clamped it shut. The cold, hard, frosty look in the stern old duck's eyes brooked no compromise.

An instant later, and I felt a hand on either arm.

"Come along," said a voice. It belonged to the Secret Service Agent who'd pulled the gun on me in the Saturnian street some twenty minutes back.

I thought of Sergeant Shane's ugly, grinning, stupid pan, and I started grinding my teeth slowly down to gum level

ALF an hour later I found myself pacing duralloy cell flooring for the hundredth time. They'd taken me right from the room in which the stern old duck presided to the downstairs confinement block belonging to the local Federation Police. But local police cell or not, the fact remained that I was actually a prisoner of the Secret Service.

When my frothing fury over my chum's colossal stupidity had subsided, I'd finally gotten around to the far more serious and necessary details of figuring this mess out from all angles.

Undoubtedly Sergeant Shane had mixed himself up with the very nasty background of Martian espionage work. The Secret Service were by no means as thick-witted as Shane, and if they'd put the finger on Clenoka and his fake company as an undercover agency for a foreign and never too friendly government, they knew whereof they spoke.

But as for my peanut brained buddy, I didn't doubt for an instant that he had nothing to do with any such treasonable hobbies as selling information to foreign powers. He was as staunch a patriot of the Federation as he was thick witted. Undoubtedly, he'd been ensnared by this Clenoka's daughter Cleo, plus the get-rich-quick realty deal that he'd been sold.

And in his big, open-minded way—open at both ends—he'd probably been convinced that everything was on the up and up.

But why had the Clenoka's been interested in him? Obviously as a source for information.

Even at that, however, Shane wasn't a fount of intelligence when it came to the deep dark secrets of the Space Fleet. He was just a cog in some huge machinery. What he'd have to spill, probably every foreign government in the interplanetary system knew already.

Then what could the Clenoka's have wanted from Shane?

Grimly, I put my brain cells to this problem. What information did Shane possess?

It kept up this way for another fifty pacings of the duralloy flooring of my cell. All the time I pounded my palms against my forehead. But this process not only didn't jar any hidden nuggets of information loose, it gave me a headache.

Then, all of a sudden, out of the fog grew the Great Dawning Light. Of course! I was as thick as Shane not to have thought of it sooner!

Shane's daily in-harbor task was the laying of the atomic mine fields around the space port entrance. It was his duty to vary the position of these mines from day to day, in line with the Admiral's jittery watchfulness during the stopover, and report these changes to Old Ironpants himself, who relayed the information to all Space Fleet craft who