"Spare me," Caird said, lifting his hand. "What I want to hear is that someday I'll walk out of this place and take my place in society again."

"That can be. I am confident that you have the potentiality to be cured. But ..

"But ... ?"

"There are political considerations. I don't want to upset you. Still, the world councillors are very upset, and the people are demanding punishment."

Caird sighed, and he said, "So, even in this near-perfect society, politics can override the strict interpretation and practice of the law."

The psychicist made a face. "There are situations where never mind. The truth is, Jeff, that you, and all of you immers, were fortunate that you were not immediately stoned after the trial. You were lucky to have a trial.

"Of course, you could have saved the state the expense of a trial if you had killed yourselves before you were arrested. You all had the means. Yet very few of you used them. You all wanted to live too much."

"Another betrayal," Caird said.

He did not feel guilt. That had been washed out by the tears along with much else. Water wears out stone.

There was a long silence. Then the psychicist, looking as if she did not want to say what she had to say, spoke.

"I've been authorized, ordered, I mean, to tell you that De'tective-Major Panthea Snick requested that she be allowed to speak to you personally. She wanted to thank you for having saved her life. The request was denied, of course."

Caird smiled and said, "Snick? She actually said that?"

"Why would I lie to you?"

"It was just a rhetorical question," he said. "Well, well! Do you know, for some reason, I have a feelimig, a hunch, that I'll see her again."

"That seems to make you happy," the psychicist said, "though I don't know why. You must know that there is not the remotest possibility that you'll ever see her again. Hunches sheer superstition."

"Perhaps hunches are the output of a sort of biological computer inside a person," Caird said. "The computer calculates all future probabilities and their chances of happening. And it comes up with a high probability for an event that a humanmade computer would rate as low. But the flesh-and-blood computer has more data than the human-made one."

"The human-made doesn't have hope in its circuitry," the psychicist said. "Hope isn't data. It's an irrelevant electromagnetic field."

"Irrelevant? Nothing is irrelevant in this tightly interconnected universe. However ..

He was silent for a few seconds, then said, "I heard, don't ask me from whom, your efforts to keep me incommunicado have not been completely successful ... I heard that the news shows said nothing about the age-slowing bacteria when they reported the trials."

The psychicist betrayed nothing on her face, but she paled slightly. She said, "How could you have heard anything? And what bacteria are you talking about? Is this some more of your nonsense?"

He smiled and said, "No one told me. I just made that up about hearing it from someone. I wanted to see your reaction. I wanted to find out if what I've suspected is true. You might as well tell me the truth. I can't pass it on to anybody. I know that every immer who was questioned told all about the elixir. That revelation would have to be passed on to the higher-ups. But I believe that it got no further than the interrogators and their superiors, and, of course, the world council. The news about it was suppressed."

The psychicist, who had become even paler, told the monitoring strip to back up the display. Having stopped it at the point where he had asked her about the bacteria, she erased all of the recording from that point forward. Then she turned the strip off.

"You think you're so clever!" she said. "You fool! You're asking to be stoned immediately!"

"What's the difference?" he said. "I've known all along that I will never be released as cured. None of us immers will be. The government will go through the legal procedures, keep us long enough to fulfill the law, then announce that we're incurable, and stone us. We'll be put away where we'll never be found.

"The government has to do that. It can't release us when it knows that we know all about the elixir. At the end of the minimum period for us 'mentally unbalanced' to be 'cured,' we go into the stoners. I've got two more submonths to live, if you can call this near-solitary confinement living. Two more months, unless the government gets uneasy and decides to stone us at once. It could do that. It could easily cover up its illegal action."

"You don't know what you're talking about!"

"Sure, I do. You know I do. You must also know, if you've any intelligence, that you're in almost as much danger as I am. The best way for the government officials who know about this to keep you silent is to offer you the elixir, too. But they must be wondering if you can keep it to yourself. Won't you want your husband, your children, all whom you love to age as slowly as you will? Won't you be strongly tempted to get it for them? Won't you ask for it for them? And what will you do if you're refused?

"They can't afford to take a chance with you. They want the elixir for themselves, a very select group, I imagine. They haven't told the public, and they won't. The social and political and you-name-it consequences would be too great. No, they're keeping it a secret, making the same mistake that Immerman did. And you and all those others who interrogated the immers and are now their keepers are dangerous to the elite, the new immers!

"The main difference between the old and the new was that my people, at least, wanted to change the government for the better!"

The psychicist sat down and looked past Caird as if she were trying to see the future. Caird felt sorry for her, but he had had to test her to determine if his suspicions were valid. That they 'were was evident.

"Maybe we'd better talk about both of us getting out of here," he said.

The psychicist stood up. Her voice shaking slightly, she said, "I don't deal with traitors." She called to a strip, and the door opened at once. Two huge male attendants entered.

"Take him to his room," she said. "And make sure that he doesn't talk to anybody on the way. Make sure!"

"I'll go quietly," Caird said. "But think about what I've said. You may not have much time to do that."

When he returned to his small but comfortably furnished room, Caird sat down. He stared at the blank wall strips as if he was trying to conjure displays of the future on them. Probably, the psychicist was doing the same in her office. But he could not depend upon her to do anything that might help him. She would be thinking of her own self-survival. Meanwhile, she would be going through the routine of therapy sessions with him. He would be going through the same mechanical business until she disappeared, having been taken away by the organics or having broken day in a frenzied effort to escape.

Next Tuesday, if events went as on many Tuesdays, he would breathe the truth mist. And he would be asked if he had thought of any way to escape.

He would reply that he had. He was hoping that he could get the psychicist to help him. That was all. He had no other plan, and that one was almost hopeless.

He sighed. Why hadn't he thought of many ways to get out of here? Any prisoner would have concocted a score of plans for escape. Any prisoner. But he had thought of only one and that had been this morning before he went to the psychicist and he had expected nothing from it. It had seemed to him more of an amusement than anything.

The psychicist had said that his lack of escape plans was puzzling her.

He was also puzzled.