"The pigeon just arrived," the voice replied. It was not loud, but it was a curiously big voice with
something of the overtones of an enormous bronze gong in it. It was also oddly like a cavernous amplification
of Iliff's own type of speech.
The agent turned to a screen on his left, in which a torpedo-like twenty-foot tube of metal had appeared,
seemingly suspended in space and spinning slowly about its axis. Actually, it was some five miles from the
ship—which was as close as it was healthy to get to a homing pigeon at the end of its voyage—and following
it at the ship's exact rate of speed, though it was driven by nothing except an irresistible urge to get to its
"roost," the pattern of which had been stamped in its molecules. The roost was on Iliff's ship, but the pigeon
would never get there. No one knew just what sort of subdimensions it flashed through on its way to its
objective or what changes were wrought on it before it reappeared, but early experiments with the gadget had
involved some highly destructive explosions at its first contact with any solid matter in normal space.
So now it was held by barrier at a safe distance while its contents were duplicated within the ship.
Then something lethal flickered from the ship to the pigeon and touched it; and it vanished with no outward
indication of violence.
