"When The Game begins," Mutreaux said, "I will be there and you, too, Pete, and we will decline to play. And perhaps by that time Nats will have managed to persuade others. I can't see that far ahead; the alternative courses are obscure to me, for reasons I can't make out." They had almost reached the McGlain apartment, now.

When they opened the door to the apartment they found Pat McClain busy packing two suitcases; she hardly paused to acknowledge their presence.

"I picked up your thoughts as you came down the hall," she said, carrying an armload of clothes to the suitcases from the dresser in the bedroom. Her face, Pete saw, had a craven, caved-in look on it; in every way she had collapsed from the disastrous clash with Mary Anne. She worked feverishly to complete her packing, as if struggling against an inexorable and yet unclearly seen deadline.

"Where are you going?" Pete asked. "Titan?"

"Yes," Patricia answered. "As far away from that girl as I possibly can get. She can't hurt me there; I'll be safe." Her hands, Pete saw, shook as she tried, and failed, to close the suitcases. "Help me," she said, appealing to Mutreaux.

Obligingly, Dave Mutreaux closed the suitcases for her.

"Before you leave," Pete said to her, "let me ask you something. How do the Titanians play The Game being telepaths?"

"Do you think you're going to care?" Patricia said, pausing, lifting her head and regarding him bleakly. "After Katz and Philipson are through with you?"

"I care now," he said. "They've been playing The Game for a long time, so evidently they've found a way to incorporate their faculty or—"

Patricia said, "They hobble it, Pete."

"I see," he said. But he did not see. Hobble it how? And to what extent?

Patricia said, "Through drug-ingestion. The effect is similar to what the phenothiazine class does to a Terran."

"Phenothiazines," Mutreaux said. "In big doses that's given" to schizophrenics; in quantity it becomes an anti-psychotic medication."

"It lessens the schizophrenic delusions," Patricia said, "because it obliterates the involuntary telepathic sense; it eradicates the paranoiac response to the picking up of subconscious hostilities in others. The Titanians possess medication' which acts along the same lines on them and the rules of The Game, as they practice it, require them to lose their talent or at least to abort it by some extent."

Mutreaux, glancing at his watch, said, "He should be here any time now, Patricia. Surely you're going to wait for him."

"Why?" she said, still gathering up articles here and there in the apartment. "I don't want to stay; I just want to get out. Before something else happens. Something more that has to do with her."

"We'll need all three of us to exert sufficient influence on Garden, here," Mutreaux pointed out.

"You get Nats Katz, then," Patricia said. "I'm telling you I'm not going to stay one minute longer than I have to!"

"But right now Katz is in Carmel," Mutreaux said, patiently. "And we want to have Garden thoroughly with us when we go there."

"I can't help," Patricia said, paying no attention to him; she could not seem to stop her headlong flight, her rushing blindly. "Listen, Dave, honest to god, there's only one thing that matters to me; I don't want to undergo again what we went through in Nevada. You were there, you know what I'm talking about. And next time she won't spare you, because now you're with us. I really advise you to get out, too; let E. G. Philipson handle this, since he's immune to

her. But it's your life; you have to decide." She went on, then, and Mutreaux somberly seated himself, with the heat-needle, waiting for Doctor Philipson to show up.

To himself Pete thought, Hobble it. Hobble the Psionic talents on both sides, as Patricia said. It could be an agreement with them; we make use of the phenothiazines, they use whatever it is they're accustomed to. So they were cheating when they read my mind. And then he thought, And they'll cheat again. We can't trust them to hobble themselves. They seem to feel that their moral obligations end when they encounter us.

"That's right," Patricia said, picking up his thoughts. "They're not going to hobble themselves when they play you, Pete. And you can't compel them to because in your own playing you don't recognize such a stipulation; you can't show them a legal basis on your side for demanding that."

"We can show them that we've never allowed Psionic talents at the board," he said.

"But you are now. Your group is voting that daughter of mine in and Dave Mutreaux in, right?" She smiled at him crookedly, heartlessly, her eyes lusterless and black. "So that's that, Pete Garden. Too bad. At least you made the try."

Bluffing, he thought. Telepaths. Hobbling through medication that acts as a thalamic suppresser, dulls the extrasensory area of the brain. It could be dulled to various degrees, damped to some extent but not entirely; gradations can be obtained, depending on the amount of medication. Ten milligrams of a phenothiazine would dampen it; sixty would obliterate it.

And then he thought, his mind careening, Suppose we didn't look at the cards we drew? There would be nothing in our minds for the Titanians to read because we wouldn't know what number we'd obtained...

To Mutreaux, Patricia said, "He's almost managed it, Dave. He forgets that he's not going to be playing on the Terran side, that he's going to belong to us by the time he seats himself at the Game board." She brought out a little overnight bag, now, hurrying to fill it.

Pete thought, If we had Mutreaux, if we could regain him, we could win. Because I know how, finally.

"You know," Patricia said, "but how is it going to help you?"

Aloud, Pete said, "We could dampen his pre-cog faculty to an undetermined degree. So that it becomes unpredictable." Through the use of phenothiazine spansules he realized, which act over a period of hours at a variable rate. Mutreaux himself would not know if he were bluffing or not, how accurate his guess was. He would draw a card, and, without looking at it, move our piece. If his pre-cog faculty were operating at maximum force at that instant his guess would be accurate; it would not be a bluff. But if at that instant the medication had a greater rather than a lesser effect on him—

It would be a bluff. And Mutreaux himself would not know. That could easily be arranged; someone else would prepare the phenothiazine spansule, fix the rate at which it would release its medication.

"But," Patricia said softly, "Dave isn't on your side of the Game-table, Pete."

Pete said, "But I'm right. That's how we could play against the Titanian telepaths and win."

"Yes," Patricia said, and nodded.

"He's worked it out now, has he?" Mutreaux asked her.

"He has," she said. "I feel sorry for you, Pete, because you've got it and it's too late in coming. Your people would have a lot of fun, wouldn't they? Preparing the grains of medication within the spansule, using all kinds of complex tables and formulae to work out the rate of release. It could be random, too, if you wanted it that way, or at a fixed but so elaborate rate that—"

To Mutreaux, Pete said, "How can you sit there and know you're betraying us? You're not a Titanian national; you're a Terran."

Calmly, Mutreaux said, "Psychic dynamisms are real, Pete, as real as any other kind of force. I foresaw my meeting with Nats Katz; I foresaw what was going to happen, but I couldn't prevent it. Remember, I didn't seek him out, he found me."

"Why didn't you warn us?" Pete said. "When you were still on our side of the board."

"You would have killed me," Mutreaux said. "I previewed that particular alternative future. In several, I did tell you. And—" He shrugged. "I don't blame you; what other course would you have? My going over to Titan determines the outcome of The Game. Our acquiring you proves that."