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waited for us above the cloud ceiling and, with his slave plane, tried to send us down.

I believed him, therefore, to be the man who had killed Selby and Kent.

"You had a little trouble?" he inquired casually of me.

"A little," I told him.

"What?" He was making it, I realized, a test of me.

"We ran short of fuel," I answered.

"Nothing else wrong?"

"No."

"Come up to my house," he invited us, with a special possessiveness in the 'my.' "Bane's my name. You must be Carrick."

I nodded.

"You're Logan," he said to Pete, who made no reply to him.

By name he had known us, then, when he had tried to send us after Selby and Kent. By name, undoubtedly, he had known them. It had been no anonymous business upon which he had been engaged in the sky; he personally had picked his people.

Pete, ignoring Bane, spoke to the girl.