He was so busy concocting the ballad, in fact, that he did not notice the three men in gray business suits with fat red necks who had entered the studio and were coming toward him, each man carrying a briefcase in a way that made it clear he was a college graduate and used to carrying it.

I really have a good ballad going, Ragland said to himself. The best one of my career. Strumming, he went on:

That was as far as Ragland got in his ballad. The leader of the group of FBI men lowered his smoking pistol, nodded to his companions, and then spoke into his wrist transmitter. “Inform Mr. Lait that we have been successful.”

The tinny voice from his wrist answered, “Good. Return to headquarters at once. He orders it.”

He, of course, was Maximilian Fischer. The FBI men knew that, knew who had sent them on their mission.

In his office at the White House, Maximilian Fischer breathed a sigh of relief when informed that Ragland Park was dead. A close call, he said to himself. That man might have finished me off—me and everybody else in the world.

Amazing, he thought, that we were able to get him. The breaks certainly went our way. I wonder why.

Could be one of my psionic talents has to do with putting an end to folk-singers, he said to himself, and grinned with sleek satisfaction.

Specifically, he thought, a psi talent for getting folksingers to compose ballads on the theme of their own destruction…

And now, he realized, the real problem. Of getting Jim Briskin back into jail. And it will be hard; Hada is probably smart enough to think of transporting him immediately to an outlying moon where I have no authority. It will be a long struggle, me against those two… and they could well beat me in the end.

He sighed. A lot of hard work, he said to himself. But I guess I got to do it. Picking up the phone, he dialed Leon Lait…

He put a twenty-dollar platinum coin into the slot and the analyst, after a pause, lit up. Its eyes shone with sociability and it swiveled about in its chair, picked up a pen and pad of long yellow paper from its desk and said, “Good morning, sir. You may begin.”

“Hello, Dr. Jones. I guess you’re not the same Dr. Jones who did the definitive biography of Freud; that was a century ago.” He laughed nervously; being a rather poverty-stricken man he was not accustomed to dealing with the new fully homeostatic psychoanalysts. “Um,” he said, “should I free-associate or give you background material or just what?”

Dr. Jones said, “Perhaps you could begin by telling me who you are und warum mich—why you have selected me.”

“I’m George Munster of catwalk 4, building WEF-395, San Francisco condominium established 1996.”

“How do you do, Mr. Munster.” Dr. Jones held out its hand, and George Munster shook it. He found the hand to be of a pleasant body-temperature and decidedly soft. The grip, however, was manly.

“You see,” Munster said, “I’m an ex-GI, a war veteran. That’s how I got my condominium apartment at WEF-395; veterans’ preference.”

“Ah yes,” Dr. Jones said, ticking faintly as it measured the passage of time. “The war with the Blobels.”

“I fought three years in that war,” Munster said, nervously smoothing his long, black, thinning hair. “I hated the Blobels and I volunteered; I was only nineteen and I had a good job—but the crusade to clear the Sol System of Blobels came first in my mind.”

“Um,” Dr. Jones said, ticking and nodding.

George Munster continued, “I fought well. In fact I got two decorations and a battlefield citation. Corporal. That’s because I single-handedly wiped out an observation satellite full of Blobels; we’ll never know exactly how many because of course, being Blobels, they tend to fuse together and unfuse confusingly.” He broke off, then, feeling emotional. Even remembering and talking about the war was too much for him… he lay back on the couch, lit a cigarette and tried to become calm.

The Blobels had emigrated originally from another star system, probably Proxima. Several thousand years ago they had settled on Mars and on Titan, doing very well at agrarian pursuits. They were developments of the original unicellular amoeba, quite large and with a highly-organized nervous system, but still amoeba, with pseudopodia, reproducing by binary fission, and in the main offensive to Terran settlers.

The war itself had broken out over ecological considerations. It had been the desire of the Foreign Aid Department of the UN to change the atmosphere on Mars, making it more usable for Terran settlers. This change, however, had made it unpalatable for the Blobel colonies already there; hence the squabble.

And, Munster reflected, it was not possible to change half the atmosphere of a planet, the Brownian movement being what it was. Within a period of ten years the altered atmosphere had diffused throughout the planet, bringing suffering—at least so they alleged—to the Blobels. In retaliation, a Blobel armada had approached Terra and had put into orbit a series of technically sophisticated satellites designed eventually to alter the atmosphere of Terra. This alteration had never come about because of course the War Office of the UN had gone into action; the satellites had been detonated by self-instructing missiles… and the war was on.

Dr. Jones said, “Are you married, Mr. Munster?”

“No sir,” Munster said. “And—” He shuddered. “You’ll see why when I’ve finished telling you. See, Doctor—” He stubbed out his cigarette. “I’ll be frank. I was a Terran spy. That was my task; they gave the job to me because of my bravery in the field… I didn’t ask for it.”

“I see,” Dr. Jones said.

“Do you?” Munster’s voice broke. “Do you know what was necessary in those days in order to make a Terran into a successful spy among the Blobels?”

Nodding, Dr. Jones said, “Yes, Mr. Munster. You had to relinquish your human form and assume the repellent form of a Blobel.”

Munster said nothing; he clenched and unclenched his fist, bitterly. Across from him Dr. Jones ticked.

That evening, back in his small apartment at WEF-395, Munster opened a fifth of Teacher’s scotch, sat by himself sipping from a cup, lacking even the energy to get a glass down from the cupboard over the sink.

What had he gotten out of the session with Dr. Jones today? Nothing, as nearly as he could tell. And it had eaten deep into his meager financial resources… meager because—

Because for almost twelve hours out of the day he reverted, despite all the efforts of himself and the Veterans’ Hospitalization Agency of the UN, to his old war-time Blobel shape. To a formless unicellular-like blob, right in the middle of his own apartment at WEF-395.

His financial resources consisted of a small pension from the War Office; finding a job was impossible, because as soon as he was hired the strain caused him to revert there on the spot, in plain sight of his new employer and fellow workers.

It did not assist in forming successful work-relationships.

Sure enough, now, at eight in the evening, he felt himself once more beginning to revert; it was an old and familiar experience to him, and he loathed it. Hurriedly, he sipped the last of the cup of scotch, put the cup down on a table… and felt himself slide together into a homogenous puddle.