At 5.30 a.m. the heavy construction rocket settled down in the centre of what had once been London. In front of it and behind it razor-sharp transports hissed to smooth land­ings and disgorged parties of armed guards. They quickly fanned out and took up positions to intercept stray Directorate police patrols.

Within a few moments the old building that was the offices of the Preston Society had been surrounded.

Reese Verrick stepped out and followed his construction workers to the side of the building. The air was chill and thin; buildings and streets were moist with night dampness, grey, silent structures with no sign of life.

"This is the place," the foreman said to Verrick. He indicated a courtyard strewn with rubble. "The monument is there."

Verrick raced up the littered path to the courtyard. Workmen were already tearing down the steel and plastic monument; the yellowed plastic cube which was John Preston's crypt had been yanked down and was resting on the concrete. Within the translucent crypt the dried-up shape had shifted slightly to one side; the face was obscured by an arm flung across the glasses and nose.

"So that's John Preston!" Verrick said.

The foreman squatted down to examine the seams of the crypt. "It's a vacuum-seal, of course. If we open it here it'll pulverize to dust particles."

"All right," Verrick agreed reluctantly. "Take the whole works to the labs. We'll open it there."

The work crews who had entered the building reappeared with armloads of pamphlets, tapes, records, endless boxes of documents and printing supplies. "The place is a store­room," one of them said to the foreman. "They had junk heaped to the ceiling. There seems to be a false wall and some kind of subsurface meeting chamber. We're knocking the wall down."

Verrick wandered into the building and found himself in the front office; only the bare water-stained walls, peeling and dirty, remained. The office led to a yellow hall. Verrick headed down it, past a fly-specked photograph of John Preston still hanging among some rusty hooks. "Don't forget this," he said to his foreman.

Beyond the picture a section of wall had been torn away, disclosing a crude false passage running parallel to the hall. Workmen were swarming about, hunting for more concealed entrances.

Verrick folded his arms and studied the photograph. Preston had been a tiny, withered leaf of a creature with wrinkled ears in a tangle of hair. Small, almost feminine, lips above a stubbled chin, not prominent but hard with determination. A crooked, lumpish nose (Preston was partly Jewish) surmounted an unsightly neck protruding from a food-stained shirt.

It was Preston's eyes that attracted Verrick. Two un­compromising, steel-sharp orbs that smouldered behind thick lenses. They glowered fiercely at Verrick; their alive-ness startled him. Even behind the dusty glass of the photograph the eyes seemed hot with fire and life and excitement.

Verrick turned away as the foreman announced:

"All loaded—the crypt, the stuff we found in the build­ing, the snap-models of the layout..."

Verrick followed his foreman back to the ship and almost immediately they were on their way back to A.G. Chemie.

Herb Moore appeared as the yellowed cube was lowered to a lab table. "This is his crypt?" he asked as he began rubbing dirt from the translucent shield that covered John Preston's withered body. "Get this stuff off," he ordered.

"It's old," one of the technicians protested. "We'll have to work carefully or it'll turn to powder."

Moore grabbed a cutting tool and began severing the shield from its base.

The shield split, brittle and dry with age. Moore clawed it away and from the opened cube a cloud of musty air billowed out and swirls of dust danced in their faces and made them cough and pull back.

Round the work-table vidcameras ground away, making a permanent record of the procedure.

Moore impatiently signalled. Two technicians lifted the wizened body and held it at eye-level. Moore poked at the face with a pointed probe, then suddenly grabbed the right arm. It came off without resistance and Moore stood holding it foolishly.

The body was a plastic dummy.

"Imitation!" He threw the arm down violently.

Moore walked all around the dummy, saying nothing to Verrick until he had examined it from all sides. Finally he took hold of the hair and tugged. The skull-covering came off, disclosing a metal hemisphere. Moore tossed the wig to one of the robots and then turned his back on the exhibit.

"It looks exactly like the photograph," Verrick said admiringly as he stepped nearer to the table.

Moore laughed. "Naturally! The dummy was made first and then photographed. But it's probably about the way Preston looked." His eyes flickered. "Looks, I mean."

Eleanor Stevens detached herself from the watching group and approached the dummy cautiously. "You think he's still alive in his own body?" Eleanor asked. "That isn't possible!"

Moore didn't answer. He was staring at the dummy; he had picked up the arm again and was mechanically pulling loose the fingers one by one. The look on his face was nothing Eleanor had ever seen before.

Abruptly he shook himself and hurried to the door. "Pellig should be entering the defence network. I want to be part of things when that happens."

Verrick and Eleanor followed quickly after him, the dummy forgotten.

"This should be interesting," Verrick muttered as he hurried to his office. Expectation gleamed in his heavy face as he snapped on the screen the ipvic technicians had set up for him. With Eleanor standing nervously behind him he prepared himself for the sight of Keith Pellig stepping from the transport to the field at Batavia.

Keith Pellig took a deep breath of warm fresh air and then glanced round. The field was crowded. Hordes of Directorate bureaucrats and milling groups of passengers were waiting fussily for ships; a constant din of noise and furious activity; the roar of ships and loudspeakers; the rumble of surface vehicles.

Al Davis noted all this as he halted the Pellig body and waited for Miss Lloyd to catch up with him.

"There he is," she gasped, bright-eyed and entranced by the sights. She began waving frantically. "Walter!"

A thin-faced man in his middle forties was edging through the throng of people. He was a typical classified official of the Directorate, one of its vast army of desk men.

He waved to Miss Lloyd and called out, but his words were lost in the general uproar.

Davis had to keep moving; he had to get rid of the chattering girl and her middle-aged companion and move towards the Directorate buildings. Down his sleeve and into his right hand ran the slender wire that fed his thumb-gun. The first moment the Quizmaster appeared in front of him—a quick movement of his hand, thumb raised, a tide of lethal energy released...

At that moment he caught sight of the expression on Walter's face.

Al Davis blindly moved the Pellig body towards the street and the lines of surface cars. Walter was a telepath, of course. There had been a flash of recognition as he had caught Davis's thoughts during a brief run-through of his programme of assassination. A group of people separated them and the Pellig body sprawled against a railing. With one bound Davis carried it over the railing.

He glanced back—Walter was not far behind him.

Davis strode on. He had to keep moving. Surface cars honked and roared; he ignored them.

Full realization was just beginning to hit him; any of the crowd might be a telepath. The word passed on, scanned from one mind to the next... The network was a chain ring; he had run up against the first link. He halted, then ducked into a shop. He dimly sensed rather than saw the group of figures quietly entering the entrance behind him. He ducked down, then dashed down an aisle between counters. What next? They were at both doors; he had trapped himself. He thought frantically, des­perately. What next?