Should I be here at all? he wondered.

Maybe this is the end for me, he said to himself. Not for them; for me. Personally. At last.

Aloud, he said, "I'm going out. I'll be back later." Turning, he set his drink glass down and left the room; he descended the porch steps and arrived at his car. Getting in, he slammed the door and sat in silence for a long, long time.

Maybe I'm more of a detriment to the group than an asset at this point, he said to himself. He lit a cigarette, then abruptly dropped it into the disposal chute of the car. For all I know, Nats might even come up with the idea we need; he's an imaginative guy.

Someone was standing on the porch, calling him; the voice drifted to him faintly. "Hey, Pete, what're you doing? Come on back inside!"

Pete started up the car. "Let's go," he ordered it.

"Yes, Mr. Garden." The car moved forward, then lifted from the pavement, skimmed above the other parked cars, beep-beeping, then above the rooftops of Carmel; at last, it headed toward the Pacific, a quarter mile west.

All I have to do, Pete thought idly, is give it the command to land. Because in another minute we'll be over water.

Would the Rushmore circuit do that? Probably.

"Where are we?" he asked it, to see if it knew.

"Over the Pacific Ocean, Mr. Garden."

"What would you do," he said, "If I asked you to set down?"

There was a moment of silence. "Call Doctor Macy at—" It hesitated; he heard the unit clicking, trying different combinations. "I would set down," it decided. "As instructed."

It had chosen. Had he?

I shouldn't be this depressed, he told himself." I shouldn't be doing things like this; it isn't reasonable.

But he was.

For a time he managed to look down at the dark water below. And then, with a turn of the tiller, he steered the car into a wide arc until it was skimming back toward land. This way isn't for me, Pete said to himself. Not the ocean. I'll pick up something at the apartment, something I can take; a bottle or so of phenobarbital, maybe. Or Emphytal.

He flew above Carmel, going north, and presently his car was passing above South San Francisco. And a few minutes later he was over Marin County. San Rafael lay directly ahead. He gave the Rushmore circuit the instructions to land at his apartment building; settling back, he waited.

"Here we are, sir." The car bumped the curb slightly. The motor clicked itself off; the car dutifully opened its door.

Pete stepped out, walked to the building door, put his key in the lock and then entered.

Upstairs, he reached the door of his and Carol's apartment; the door was unlocked and he opened it and passed on inside.

The lights were on. In the living room a lanky, middle-aged man sat in the center of the couch, legs crossed, reading the Chronicle.

"You forget," the man said, tossing the newspaper down, "that a pre-cog previews every possibility that he's later going to know about. And a suicide on your part would be big news." Dave Mutreaux rose to his feet, hands in his pockets; he seemed completely at ease. "This would be an especially unfortunate time for you to kill yourself, Garden."

"Why?" Pete demanded.

Mutreaux said quietly, "Because if you don't, you're on the verge of finding an answer to the Game-problem. The answer to how one bluffs a race of telepaths. I can't give it to you; only you can think it up. But it's going to be there. Not, however, if you're dead ten minutes from now." He nodded in the direction of the bathroom and its medicine cabinet. "I've done a little rigging along the lines of the alternate future I'd like to see become actual; while I've

been here I've disposed of your pills. The medicine cabinet is empty."

Pete went at once into the bathroom and looked.

Not even the aspirin remained. He saw only bare shelves.

To the medicine cabinet he said, angrily, "You let him do this?"

Its Rushmore Effect answered cringingly, "He said it was for your own good, Mr. Garden. And you know how you are when you're depressed."

Slamming the cabinet door, Pete walked back into the living room.

"You've got me, Mutreaux," he conceded. "At least in one respect. The way I had in mind—"

"You can find some other way, of course," Mutreaux said calmly. "But emotionally you lean toward suicide by oral means. Poisons, narcotics, sedatives, hypnotics and so forth." He smiled. "There's a resistance to doing it by any other means. For instance, by dropping into the Pacific."

Pete said, "Can you tell me anything about my solution to the Game-playing problem?"

"No," Mutreaux said. "I can't. That's entirely up to you."

"Thanks," Pete said sardonically.

"Ill tell you one thing, however. A hint. One which may cheer you or it may not. I can't preview it because you aren't going to show your reaction visibly. Patricia McClain is not dead."

Pete stared at him.

"Mary Anne didn't destroy her. She set her down somewhere. Don't ask me where because I don't know. But I preview Patricia's presence in San Rafael within the next few hours. At her apartment."

Pete could think of nothing to say; he continued to stare at the pre-cog.

"See?" Mutreaux said. "No palpable reaction of any sort. Perhaps you're ambivalent." He added, "She'll only be there a short time; then she's going to Titan. And not by Doctor Philipson's Psionic means but in the more conventional manner, by interplan ship."

"She's really on their side, isn't she? There's no doubt of that?"

"Oh yes," Mutreaux said, nodding. "She's really on their side. But that's not going to stop you from going, is it?"

"No," Pete said, and started from the apartment.

"May I come along?" Mutreaux asked.

"Why?"

"To keep her from killing you."

Pete was silent a moment. "It's really like that, is "it?"

Mutreaux nodded. "It certainly is, and you know it. You watched them shoot Hawthorne."

"Okay," Pete said. "Come with me." He added, "Thanks." It was hard to say it.

They left the apartment building together, Pete slightly ahead of David Mutreaux.

As they reached the street, Pete said, "Did you know that Nats Katz, the disc jockey, showed up at the con-apt in Carmel?"

Nodding, Dave Mutreaux said, "Yes. I met him an hour or so ago and talked to him; he looked me up. It was the first time I had ever run into him, although of course I had heard of him." He added, "It's because of him that I crossed over."

"Crossed over?" Halting, Pete turned toward Mutreaux, who followed after him.

And found himself, incredibly, facing a heat-needle.

"With Katz," Mutreaux said calmly. "The pressure simply was too much on me, Pete. I couldn't effectively resist it. Nats is extraordinarily powerful. He was chosen to be leader of the Wa Pei Nan here on Terra for a good reason. Come on, let's continue on our way to Patricia McClain's apartment." He gestured with the heat-needle.

After a moment Pete said, "Why didn't you just let me kill myself? Why intervene at all?"

"Because," Dave Mutreaux said, "you're coming over to our side, Pete. We can make good use of you. The Wa Pei Nan doesn't approve of this Game-playing solution; once we manage to penetrate Pretty Blue Fox by means of you, we can call The Game off from, this end." He added, "We've already discussed it with the moderate faction on Titan and they're determined to play; they like to play and they feel

this controversy between the two cultures ought to be resolved within a legal framework. Needless to say, the Wa Pei Nan does not agree."

They continued along the dark sidewalk, toward the Mc-Clain apartment, Dave Mutreaux slightly behind Pete.

"I should have guessed," Pete said. "When Katz showed up. I had an intuition but I didn't act on it." They had penetrated the group and directly, it seemed, through him. He wished now that he had managed to find the courage to drop his car into the sea; he had been right; it would have been better for everyone concerned. Everyone and everything he believed in.