As Mary Anne went out the door, Patricia said urgently to her husband, "The heat-needle; set it on low. So it doesn't injure her."

"I'll cut her down," Alien said, and pointed the heat-needle at his daughter's back. Mary Anne turned for an instant, and saw the heat-needle.

The heat-needle jumped from Alien McClain's hand, climbed and reversed its flight. It smashed against the wall.

"Poltergeist effect," Alien said. "We can't stop her." Now the heat-needle in Patricia's hands quivered, struggled and tore loose from her fingers. "Rothman," he said, appealing to the highest authority in the organization present. "Ask her to stop."

"Leave my mind alone," Mary Anne said to Rothman.

Pete Garden, on his feet, sprinted after Mary Anne. The girl saw that, too.

"No," Patricia called after her. "Don't!"

Rothman, his forehead bulging, concentrated on Mary Anne, his eyes virtually shut. But all at once Pete Garden flopped forward, like a rag doll, boneless, danced in the air, his limbs jiggling. He drifted, then, toward the wall of the motel room, and Patricia McClain screamed at Mary Anne. The dangling figure hesitated, briefly, and then swooped into the wall; it passed through the wall until only its outstretched arm and hand remained projecting absurdly.

"Mary Anne!" Patricia shouted. "For god's sake bring him back!"

At the door, Mary Anne halted, turned in panic, saw what she had done with Pete Garden, saw the expression on her mother's face and on Alien's face, the horror of everyone in the room. Rothman, focusing everything which

he possessed on her, was trying to persuade her. She saw that, too. And—

"Thank god," Alien McClain said, and sagged. From the wall, Pete Garden tumbled back out, fell in a heap on the floor, intact; he got up almost at once and stood shaking, facing Mary Anne.

'I'm sorry," Mary Anne said, and sighed. Rothman said, "We hold the dominant possibility here, Mary Anne; believe that. Even if they have gotten in. We'll examine everyone in the organization, person by person. Shall we start with you?" To Patricia he said, "Try and find out for me just how deeply they've penetrated her."

"I'm trying," Patricia said. "But it's in Pete Garden's mind that we'll find the most."

"He's going to leave," Alien and Dave Mutreaux said, almost at once. "With her, with Mary Anne." Mutreaux said, "She can't be predicted but I think he's going to make it."

Rothman rose to his feet and walked toward Pete Garden. "You see our situation; we're in a desperate match with the Titanians and losing ground to them steadily. Prevail on Mary Anne McClain to stay here so we can regain what we've lost; we have to or we're doomed."

"I can't make her do anything," Pete said, white and trembling, almost unable to speak.

"Nobody can," Patricia said, and Alien nodded. "You p-ks," Rothman said to Mary Anne. "So willful and stubborn; nobody can tell you anything."

"Come on, Pete," Mary Anne said to him. "We have to get a long way from here, because of me and because of you, too; they're into you just as they are in me." Her face was drawn with despair and fatigue.

Pete said to her, "Maybe they're right, Mary Anne; maybe it would be wrong to go. Wouldn't that split up your organization?"

"They don't really want me," Mary Anne said. "I'm weak; this proves it. I can't stand up against the vugs. The damn vugs, I hate them." Tears filled her eyes, tears of impotence. The pre-cog Dave Mutreaux said, "Garden, I can preview one thing; if you do leave here, alone or with Mary Anne McClain, your car will be intercepted by the police.

I foresee a vug detective moving toward you; its name is—" Mutreaux hesitated.

"E. B. Black," Alien McClain, also pre-cog, agreed, finishing for him. "Wade Hawthorne's partner, attached to their West Coast division of the national law-enforcement agency. One of the best they have," he said to Mutreaux, and Roth-man nodded.

"Let's do this carefully," Rothman said. "At what point in time did the vug authority penetrate our organization? Last night? Previous to last night? If we could establish that, maybe we'd have something to go on. I don't think they've gotten very deep; they haven't touched me, haven't reached any of our telepaths and we have four of them in this room and a fifth on the way here. And our pre-cogs are free, at least so it would seem."

Mary Anne said, "You're trying to probe into me and influence me, Rothman." But she returned slowly to where she had been sitting. "I can feel your mind at work." She smiled a little. "It's reassuring."

To Pete Garden, Rothman said, "I'm the main bulwark against the vugs, Mr. Garden, and it'll be a long time before they penetrate me." His leatherlike face was impassive. "This is a dreadful discovery we've made here today, but our organization can surmount it. What about you, Garden? You're going to need our help. For an individual it's different."

Somberly, Pete nodded.

"We must kill E. B. Black," Patricia said.

"Yes," Dave Mutreaux said, "I agree."

Rothman said, "Go easily, here. We've never killed a vug. Killing Hawthorne was bad enough, sufficiently dangerous but necessary. As soon as we destroy a vug—any vug—it'll become clear to them not only that we exist but what our final intentions are. Isn't that so?" He looked around at the organization for confirmation.

"But," Alien McClain said, "they obviously know about us already. They could hardly penetrate us without knowing of our existence." His voice was sharp, edged with exasperation.

The telepath Merle Smith spoke up from her seat in the

corner; she had taken no part in the colloquy so far. "Roth-man, I have been scanning each person here in the motel and I find no indication that anyone has been penetrated in addition to Mary Anne McClain and the non-P Garden whom she wanted brought here, although there is a peculiar inert area in David Mutreaux' mind which should be looked into. I wish you other telepaths would do that, right now."

At once Patricia turned her attention on Dave Mutreaux.

Merle, she discovered, was correct; there was an anomaly in Mutreaux' mind and she felt at once that it implied a situation unfavorable to the interests of the organization. "Mutreaux," she said, "can you turn your thoughts to—" It was difficult to know what to call it. She had, in her hundred years of scanning, never run into anything quite like it. Puzzled, she passed over Mutreaux' surface thoughts and probed into the deeper levels of his psyche, into the involuntary and repressed syndromes which had been excluded as part of his ego-character, of the conscious self-system.

Now she was in a region of ambivalent drives, and of nebulous and stillborn wishes, anxieties, doubts interwoven with regressive beliefs and libido wishes of a fantastic nature. It was not a pleasant region but each person had it; she was accustomed to it, by now. This was what made her existence so rife with difficulty, running into this hostile area of the human mind. Each perception and observation which Dave Mutreaux had rejected in himself existed here, imperishable, living on in a kind of half-life, feeding deeply on his psychic energy.

He could not be held responsible for these, and yet there they were anyhow, semi-autonomous and—feral. Opposed to everything Mutreaux consciously, deliberately believed in. In opposition to all his life aims.

Much could be learned about Mutreaux' psyche by this examination of what he chose to—or had to—reject from consciousness.

"The area in question," Patricia said, "simply will not open up to scanning. Can you control it, Dave?"

Mutreaux said haltingly, a bewildered expression on his face, "I don't understand what's being discussed. Everything

in me is open to you, as far as I know; I'm certainly not deliberately holding back."