"That's why teeps forced us to take up Minimax," Moore confirmed. "You can't use strategy against tele­paths, you have to act randomly."

"Assassins in the past," Verrick continued, "tried to find ways of making free decisions. Plimp helped them. Essentially, plimp is assassin-practice. The pocket boards turn up combinations by which any variety of decision can be made. The assassin threw on his board, read the number, and acted accordingly. The telepaths wouldn't know in advance what the board was going to show, any more than the assassin would. But that wasn't good enough. The assassin played this damned M-game but still he lost. He lost because the teeps were playing it, too, and there were eighty of them and only one of him. He got squeezed out statistically, except once in a while."

"Pellig is obviously the answer," Moore exclaimed. "We have twenty-four different minds. There'll be no contact between them. Each of the twenty-four sits in a different cubicle here at Chemie. Each is connected to the implementation machinery. At intervals we switch in a different mind—picked at random. Each mind has a fully developed strategy. But nobody knows which mind is coming up next, or when. Nobody knows which strategy, which pattern of action, is about to start. The telepaths won't know from one minute to the next what the Pellig body is going to do."

Benteley felt a chilly admiration for this ruthless technician.

Eleanor Stevens' flat was a series of attractive rooms in the living quarters of the A.G. Chemie Hill. Benteley gazed around appreciatively as Eleanor closed the door and moved about turning on lights and straightening things. She lowered the translucent filter over the view-wall of the flat. The night sky with its cold stars, the glittering sparks and shapes that made up the Hill, dimmed and faded. Eleanor glanced at him sideways, a little embarrassed.

She again strolled round the room, hands deep in her pockets, suddenly thoughtful. "I never saw anything in being telepathic; it meant I had to be trained for the Corps. I have no classification. If Verrick drops me that's the end."

She gazed up at him pathetically. "I hate being alone. I get so frightened."

"You want to be alone but you're afraid," Benteley suggested.

"I don't want to be alone. I hate waking up in the morning and finding nobody near me. I hate coming home to an empty flat."

Benteley wandered over to the translucent view-wall and restored it to transparency. "The Hill looks pretty at night," he said, gazing moodily out. "You wouldn't know, to look at it now, what it really is."

Eleanor poured drinks and brought Benteley his. He sat sipping, Eleanor beside him on the couch. In the half-light the girl's crimson hair glowed and sparkled. She had drawn her legs up and under her. Resting against the man, her eyes closed, glass cupped in her red-tipped fingers, she asked softly: "Are you going to be one of us?"

Benteley was silent a moment. "Yes," he said finally. He leaned over and set down his glass on a low table. "I took an oath to Verrick, so I've no choice, unless I want to break that oath."

"It's been done before."

"I've never broken my oath. I got fed up with Oiseau-Lyre years ago but I never tried to get away. I accept the law that gives a protector the power of life and death over serfs, and I don't think an oath should be broken, by either serf or protector."

Eleanor put her glass aside and reached up to put her smooth bare arms round his neck. He touched the girl's soft, flame-red hair and held her tight against him for a long time. She stretched up to kiss him on the mouth, her warm, intense face vibrating against his for a moment. Then she sank back with a sigh. "It's going to be wonder­ful, working together—being together..."

Leon cartwright was eating breakfast with Rita O'Neill and Peter Wakeman when the ipvic relay operator notified him of a closed-circuit transmission from Groves.

"Sorry," Groves said, as the two of them faced each other across billions of miles of space. "I see it's morning there. You're still wearing your dressing-gown."

The image was bad; extreme distance made it waver and fade. Grove's features had a ghostly cast, as if the transmission was coming from a grave.

"We're forty astronomical units out," Groves began. Cartwright's haggard appearance was a shock to him, but he was not certain how much was due to the distortions of a long-distance relay transmission. "We'll start moving into uncharted space soon. I've already switched from the official navigation charts to Preston's material."

The ship had gone perhaps half-way. Flame Disc held an orbit of twice the radius vector of Pluto. The orbit of the ninth planet marked the limit of charting and explora­tion; beyond it lay an infinite waste about which little was known though much had been conjectured. In a short while the ship would pass the final signal buoys and leave the finite, familiar universe behind.

"How have things been going?" Cartwright asked.

"I had to kill Ralf Butler. And a lot of us are recovering in the infirmary. The ship will go on, now. We squashed that. But a number really want to go back. They know we're already leaving the known system. This is their last chance to jump ship; if they don't do it now they're stuck all the way to the end, whatever it may be."

"How many would jump ship if they could?"

"Perhaps ten."

"Can you go on without those ten?"

"Some would have been useful in setting up the actual colony." Grove's dark face showed the unhurried working of his mind. "I think we could manage."

Cartwright's hands twitched. "Where would they go? Back to Pluto? There's a Hill base on Pluto; they might tip off Verrick."

"We're billions of miles from Pluto. And the lifeboat has almost no thrust; they'd have to beat back our velocity to zero before they could even start moving. It'd take them weeks to cover the distance to the nearest possible patrol station."

Cartwright licked his dry lips. "How about the emer­gency ipvic in the boat?"

"It's been out of commission since we purchased it."

"Go ahead, then, if it won't jeopardize the ship."

Groves was worried, but not about the ship. "When we talked before, I didn't have a chance to congratulate you. I wish I could shake your hand, Leon." Groves held his hand to the ipvic screen; Cartwright did the same, and their fingers appeared to touch separated though they were by millions of miles of dust and heatless waste. Groves kept his worry from showing and with an effort managed to smile. "You people on Earth are used to your status by this time. But here we still look upon it as a miracle."

A muscle in Cartwright's cheek jerked spasmodically. "It still seems almost—dreamlike. A kind of nightmare I can't wake up from."

"Nightmare! You mean the assassin?"

"I'm sitting here waiting for him."

"Do you know any more about him?"

"My telepaths say the name of Keith Pellig has been in the minds of Verrick and his staff for months, but what it means..."

Groves went on: "If news comes that you're dead we'll drop out of sight. We'll cut our transmission to Batavia, perhaps even demolish the transmitter."

"I hope," Cartwright replied, "that when I'm killed you'll be in sight of the Disc." He moved away from the screen. "If you'll excuse me, Wakeman is briefing me on the Corps's strategy."

"Good luck," Groves said as he broke the transmission connection.

He called Konklin into the control bubble and un­emotionally briefed him in a few words. "Cartwright agrees to let them jump ship. That takes care of them; it's the rest of us I'm worried about. I suppose you know the reactors are eating up fuel faster than we had expected? Efficiency is down almost to nil; if we have to spend a lot of time looking for the Disc..."