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Stormgren wondered what he was thinking. He wondered, too, if Wainwright had made any contact with the men who had kidnapped him. He doubted it, for he believed Wainwright’s disapproval of violent methods to be perfectly genuine. The extremists in his movement had discredited themselves thoroughly, and it would be a long time before the world heard of them again.

The head of the Freedom League listened in silence while the draft was read to him. Stormgren hoped that he appreciated this gesture, which had been Karellen’s idea. Not for another twelve hours would the rest of the world know of the promise that had been made to its grandchildren.

“Fifty years,” said Wainwright thoughtfully. “That is a long time to wait.”

“Not for Karellen, nor for humanity,” Stormgren answered. Only now was he beginning to realize the neatness of the Overlords’ solution. It had given them the breathing space they believed they needed, and it had cut the ground from beneath the Freedom League’s feet. He did not imagine that the League would capitulate, but its position would be seriously weakened.

Certainly Wainwright realized this as well, as he must also have realized that Karellen would be watching him. For he said very little and left as quickly as he could: Stormgren knew that he would not see him again in his term of office. The Freedom League might still be a nuisance, but that was a problem for his successor.

There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done about good men who were deluded.

“Here’s your case,” said Duval. “It’s as good as new.”

“Thanks,” Stormgren answered, inspecting it carefully nonetheless. “Now perhaps you can tell me what it was all about—and what we are going to do next.”

The physicist seemed more interested in his own thoughts.

“What I can’t understand,” he said, “is the ease with which we’ve got away with it. Now if I’d been Kar—”

“But you’re not. Get to the point, man. What did we discover?”

“Ah me, these excitable, highly strung Nordic races!” sighed Duval. “Well, it’s rather a long story, but the first piece of equipment you carried was a tiny echo sounder using supersonic waves. We went right up the audio spectrum, so high that I was sure no possible sense organs could detect us. When you pressed the button, a rather complicated set of sound pulses went out in various directions. I won’t bother about the details, but the main idea was to measure the thickness of the screen and to find the dimensions of the room, if any, behind it.

“The screen seems to be about five inches thick, and the space behind it is at least ten yards across. We couldn’t detect any echo from the further wall, but we hardly expected to. However, we did get this.”

He pushed forward a photographic record which to Stormgren looked rather like the autograph of a mild earthquake.

“See that little kink?”

“Yes: what is it?”

“Only Karellen.”

“Good Lord! Are you sure?”

“It’s a pretty safe guess. He’s sitting, or standing, or whatever he does, about two yards on the other side of the screen. If the resolution had been better, we might even have calculated his size.”

Stormgren’s feelings were very mixed as he stared at the scarcely visible deflection of the trace. Until now, there had been no proof that Karellen even had a material body. The evidence was still indirect, but he accepted it with little question.

Duval’s voice cut into his reverie.

“The piece of equipment you carried on your second visit was similar,” he said, “but used light instead of sound. We had to measure the transmission characteristics of the screen, and that presented considerable difficulties. Obviously we dared not use visible light, so once again we chose frequencies so high that we couldn’t imagine any eye focusing them—or any atmosphere transmitting them very far. And again we managed to carry it off.

“You’ll realize,” he continued, “that there’s no such thing as a truly one-way glass. Karellen’s screen, we found when we analyzed our results,