"Who killed Luckman?" Pete asked. "Did you?"

"No," Mary Anne said. "The last thing we'd do is kill a

man who's had so much luck, so many offspring; that's the whole point." She frowned at him.

"But last night," he said slowly, "I asked you if your people had done it. And you said—" He paused, trying to think clearly, trying to sort out the confusion of those events. "I know what you said. 'I forget,' you said. And—you said our baby is next; you called it a thing, you said it was not a baby."

For a long time Mary Anne stared at him. "No," she whispered, stricken and pale. "I didn't say that; I know I didn't."

"I heard you," he insisted. "I remember that; it's a mess, but honest to god, I have that part clear."

Mary Anne said, "Then they've gotten to me." Her words were scarcely audible; he had to bend toward her to hear. She continued to stare at him.

Opening the door of the sun-drenched kitchen, Carol Holt Garden said, "Pete—are you in there?" She peered in.

He was not in the kitchen. Bright, yellow and warm, it was empty.

Going to the window she looked out at the street below. Pete's car and hers, at the curb; he had not gone in his car then.

Tying the cord of her robe she hurried out of the apartment and down the hall to the elevator. I'll ask it, she decided. The elevator will know whether he went out, whether anyone was with him and if so who. She pressed the button, waited.

The elevator arrived; the doors slid back.

On the floor of the elevator lay a man, dead. It was Hawthorne.

She screamed.

"The lady said no help was necessary," the Rushmore circuit of the elevator said, apologetically.

With difficulty Carol said, "What lady?"

"The dark-haired lady." It did not elaborate.

"Did Mr. Garden go with them?" Carol asked.

"They came up without him but returned with him from his apartment, Mrs. Garden. The man, not Mr. Garden, killed

this person here. Mr. Garden then said, 'They've kidnapped me and they've killed a detective. Get help.'"

"What did you do?"

The elevator said. "The dark-haired lady said, 'Cancel the last request. We don't need any help. Thank you.' So I did nothing." The elevator was silent a moment. "Did I do wrong?" it inquired.

Carol whispered, "Very wrong. You should have gotten help, as he said."

"Can I do anything now?" the elevator asked.

"Call the San Francisco Police Department and tell them to send someone here. Tell them what happened." She added, "That man and woman kidnapped Mr. Garden and you didn't do anything."

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Garden," the elevator apologized.

Turning, she made her way step by step back to the apartment; in the kitchen she seated herself unsteadily at the table. Those stupid, maddening Rushmore circuits, she thought; they seem so intelligent and they actually aren't. All it takes is something unusual, something unexpected. But what did I do? Not much better, I slept while they came and got Pete, the man and woman. It sounds like Pat McClain, she thought. Dark-haired. But how do I know?

The vidphone rang.

She did not have the energy to answer it.

Trimming his red beard, Joe Schilling sat by his vidphone, waiting for an answer. Strange, he thought. Maybe they're still asleep. It's only ten-thirty. But—

He did not think so.

Hurriedly, he finished trimming his beard; he put on his coat and strode from his apartment and downstairs to Max, his car.

"Take me to the Gardens' apartment," he instructed as he slid in.

"Up yours," the car said.

"It's curtains for you if you don't take me there," Schilling said.

The car, reluctantly, started up and drove down the street, making the trip the hard way, by surface. Schilling im-

patiently watched the buildings and maintenance equipment pass, one by one, until at last they reached San Rafael.

"Satisfied?" the car Max said, as it pulled to a bucking, clumsy halt before the Gardens' apartment building.

Pete's car and Carol's car were both parked at the curb, he noticed as he got out. And so were two police cars.

By elevator he ascended to their floor, rushed down the hall. The door to the Gardens' apartment was open. He stepped inside.

A vug met him.

"Mr. Schilling." Its thought-propagation was questioning in tone.

"Where are Pete and Carol?" he demanded. And then he saw, past the vug, Carol Garden seated at the kitchen table, her face waxen. "Is Pete okay?" he said to her, pushing past the vug.

The vug said, "I am E. B. Black; probably you remember me, Mr. Schilling. Be calm. I catch from your thoughts a complete innocence of this, so I will not bother to interrogate you."

Raising her head, Carol said starkly to Schilling, "Wade Hawthorne, the detective, has been murdered and Pete's gone. A man and woman came and got him, according to the elevator. They killed Hawthorne. I think it was Pat McClain; the police checked at her apartment and nobody's there. And their car is gone."

"But—do you know why they would take Pete?" Schilling asked her.

"No, I don't know why they would take Pete; I don't even know who 'they' are, really."

With a pseudopodium, the vug E. B. Black held something small; it extended it toward Joe Schilling. "Mr. Garden wrote this interesting inscription," the vug said. " 'We are entirely surrounded by vugs.' That, however, is not so, as Mr. Garden's disappearance testifies to. Last night Mr. Garden called my ex-colleague Mr. Hawthorne and told him that he knew who had killed Mr. Luckman. At that time we imagined we had the killer and so we were not interested. Now we have learned we were in error. Mr. Garden did not say who had killed Mr. Luckman, unfortunately, because my ex-col-

leagues refused to listen." The vug was silent a moment. "Mr. Hawthorne has paid for his foolishness rather fully."

Carol said, "E. B. Black thinks that whoever killed Luckman came and got Pete and ran into Hawthorne in the elevator on their way out."

"But it doesn't know who that is," Schilling said.

"Correct," E. B. Black said. "From Mrs. Garden I have managed to learn a great deal, however. For instance, I have learned whom Mr. Garden saw last night. A psychiatrist in Pocatello, Idaho, first of all. Also Mary Anne McClain; we have not been able to locate her, however. Mr. Garden was drunk and confused. He told Mrs. Garden that the murder of Mr. Luckman had been committed by six members of Pretty Blue Fox, the six with defective memories. This would include himself. Do you have any comment on that, Mr. Schilling?"

"No," Joe Schilling murmured.

"We hope to get back Mr. Garden alive," E. B. Black said. It did not sound very confident.

XII

PATRICIA MCCLAIN picked up her daughter's frightened thoughts. At once she said, "Rothman, we've been infiltrated. Mary Anne says so."

"Is she right?" Rothman, old hard-eyed and tough, demanded from where he, as their leader, sat.

Looking into Pete Garden's mind, Patricia saw his memory of the visit to Doctor E. R. Philipson, the strange sense of lightness, of fractional gravity as he walked down the corridor. "Yes," Patricia said. "Mary's right. He's been on Titan." She turned to the two pre-cogs, Dave Mutreaux and her husband Alien. "What's going to happen?"

"A variable," Alien murmured, ashen-faced. "Clouds it up."

Mutreaux said hoarsely, "Your daughter, she's going to do something; impossible for us to tell what."

"I have to get out of here," Mary Anne said to them all.

She rose to her feet, her thoughts scattered by her terror, "I'm under vug influence. That Doctor Philipson, Pete must have been right. He asked me what I saw in the bar and I thought he was hallucinating. But it wasn't my fear he was picking up. He saw reality." She started toward the door of the motel room, panting. "I have to get away. I'm dangerous to the organization."