and

will only be a few more hours, Paul. By breakfast time, Koslo will know his rigged election didn't take."
"But if he takes you first, that's the end, Johnny. Without you the coup will collapse like a soap bubble."
"I'm not leaving the city," Mallory said flatly. "Yes, there's a certain risk involved; but you don't bring down a dictator without taking a few chances."
"You didn't have to take this one, meeting Crandall yourself."
"It will help if he sees me, knows I'm in this all the way."
In silence, the two men waited the arrival of their fellow conspirator.
* * *
Aboard the interstellar dreadnought cruising half a parsec from Earth, the compound Ree mind surveyed the distant solar system.
Radiation on many wavelengths from the third body, the Perceptor cells directed the impulse to the sixty-nine hundred and thirty-four units comprising the segmented brain which guided the ship. Modulations over the forty-ninth through the ninety-first spectra of mentation.
A portion of the pattern is characteristic of exocosmic manipulatory intelligence, the Analyzers extrapolated from the data. Other indications range in complexity from levels one through twenty-six.
This is an anomalous situation, the "o