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I cut down the volume. Hanley switched in. "By God. Phil! This " "Off, Chief! Let me hear, too!" He cut away. Those distorted voices! They came from Perona and the bandits to me across this five hundred foot moonlit bowl; from me, thirteen hundred miles up to Hanley's instruments; and back to me once more. But the words, most of them, now were distinguishable. Perona's voice: "I tell it to you.
I crouched and held it cautiously above my head with its face, like a listening ear, turned toward the distant men. My single-vacuum amplification brought up the sound until their voices sounded like whispers murmured in my ear-grids. "De Boer, listen to me " Perona's voice. They must have been chance words spoken loudly. It was all I could hear, save tantalizing, unintelligible murmurs.
Nor would I have dared use one: Perona could too obviously have seen that someone was following him. There was half a mile of this, I think, though it seemed interminable. I could hear the sea, rising with the wind, pounding against the rocks to my left. Then, a distance ahead, I saw lights moving. Perona's and others. Three or four of them.
Followed Perona; he met these men. "The big one is De Boer, the depth bandit. I can't hear what they're saying but I can send you their voice murmurs." "Amplify them all you can. Relay them up," Hanley ordered. I caught Perona's murmurs again; I swung them through my tiny transformers and off my transmitter points into the ether. "Hear them, Chief?" "Yes. I'll try further amplification."
And a bandit flyer could not very well land unseen or unnoticed, even in somnolent Nareda. I reached the main section of the village. There were occasional lights and pedestrians. My haste was noticeable, but I was not accosted. There seemed no police about. I recalled Perona's remark that he had attended to that. My electrode was tingling. I had been running again. I slowed down. "Chief?"
The Nareda streets were quiet. There was a few pedestrians, and none of them paid much attention to me. It was no more than ten minutes walk to Perona's home. His house was set back from the road, surrounded by luxurious vegetation. There was a gate in front of the garden, and another, a hundred feet or to along a small alleyway which bordered the ground to my left.
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