It was Michael’s father who had been primarily responsible for getting Galen out of the chaos of postwar Germany; the kind of help the old man had given during those years had never been made explicit to Michael, by either man; but after his father’s death, Galen was-there. Silent, withdrawn, unsentimental-but there.

Michael shook himself mentally. This was a sidetrack, a waste of time. There was no point in speculating when, in a few hours, he would have the answer in his hands. In the meantime…

He thought for another hour. At the end of that time he finally moved, but not much; when he finished, there was on the table a single sheet of paper. It contained only four names, in Michael’s cramped writing, but he contemplated the meager results of his labors with grim satisfaction.

Then he picked up the pen and added a phrase after three of the names.

William Wilson. Dead. Suicide?

Tommy Scarinski. Nervous breakdown; attempted suicide.

Joseph Schwartz. Breakdown; drugs.

He paused, pen poised, studying the list. Incredulity was hard to conquer. It seemed so unlikely… Yet there they were, four of the people who had been closest to Gordon Randolph in his adult life. His campaign manager and friend, and his three prize students during that single year as a teacher-a position, surely, that gives a man or woman enormous influence over younger minds. And of those three, one was still a nervous wreck, and another had retreated from a promising career into a world of drug-induced terrors. And the third…

The third was Randolph ’s wife.

III

Threading a tempestuous path through a mammoth traffic jam, Michael blasphemed the beautiful weather and the long weekend. The balmy sunshine had infected half the inhabitants of the city with the urge to flee to Nature. Galen’s secretary was one of them. It was after ten that morning when the answering service told him the office wouldn’t be open, and he had wasted more time in a futile attempt to track down Galen’s secretary. Finally he drove to Galen’s house and harassed his manservant until the poor devil consented to open up the office and help him search. That had taken several more hours-the harassment, not the search. Whatever her other failings, Galen’s secretary did what she was told. The envelope, with Michael’s name typed neatly on it, was in the top drawer of her desk.

Badly as he wanted to examine the contents, another need was stronger. He had wakened that morning with a renewed uneasiness, not so demolishing as the call that had summoned him the night before, but constant and peremptory. He was on his way now to answer it.

He braked, swearing, as a blue Volkswagen roared blithely past on the left and ducked into the nice legal margin between Michael’s car and the rear of the one ahead of him. He couldn’t even think in this chaos; driving took too much concentration, with so many morons on the road.

He resisted the childish desire to drive right up onto the back fender of the Volkswagen. Today, of all days, he couldn’t take any chances. The afternoon was far gone; but he would reach his destination in two or three hours, and by that time he had to have a clearer idea of what he meant to do when he got there. So far the demand had been strong and basic, blotting out all thoughts but one: Get there. Sooner or later, though, he would have to make a plan. He couldn’t stand on Andrea’s doorstep waiting for another message from Beyond.

Linda must be at Andrea’s. It was the only place she knew, the only potential ally who had not failed her. Michael had reached that conclusion logically; direction was one of the elements the mental call had lacked. Gordon had already searched the witch’s cottage, which did not lessen the probability of Linda’s being there now; the safest hiding place is one that has already been investigated. But she would be wary of visitors in general and hostile toward Michael in particular. Remembering the telephone book, open to the page with Galen’s name, Michael felt the same mixture of shame and chagrin that had moved him originally. He wasn’t proud of his performance that night. To say the least, it had been stupid. She probably thought of it as betrayal. No, she wouldn’t let him into the house, not unless the days of loneliness and fear had reduced her courage to the breaking point. He might have to break into the house-a prospect he faced with surprising equanimity. For such a purpose, darkness would be useful.

But when he stopped at a restaurant in the next town, it was not only because of the need to kill a little more time. He couldn’t wait any longer to see what was in Galen’s envelope.

It was a big Manila envelope and it was sealed not only by tape but by a heavy wad of sealing wax. The wax was fresh and the envelope clean, which meant that the material it contained must have been gathered together only recently. It was not one of those envelopes so dear to writers of sensational fiction, which has been moldering for years in a secret hiding place until the deus ex machina of the book produces it just in time to foil the villain. The envelope was not bulky. It could not contain more than a dozen sheets of paper.

When he had the papers in his hand, Michael sat staring blindly at them for a while before he started to read. He had been expecting what he found; it was, after all, the most logical connecting link between Galen and Randolph. But it was still something of a shock to see again the sprawling, angular handwriting that had once been as familiar as his own.

A letter a week for almost seven years, arriving every Tuesday morning. Careless and unmethodical as his father was about other things, he wrote every Sunday. Michael never kept personal letters after he answered them; there certainly had been no particular point in saving his father’s. They were good letters, informative and amusing because of their acidulous comments on people, books, and events. So far as he could remember, the old man had never mentioned Randolph. Which was not surprising; by the time he had left home, Randolph was no longer a student.

His father had written less frequently to Galen, but he had kept up a regular correspondence with his old friend. Galen never threw anything away. These letters were only a small part of the mass of materials that were docketed, labeled, and filed-both in the neat cabinets filling several rooms of Galen’s house, and in the latter’s capacious memory. Galen had not kept these letters because of a premonition. But he would not have produced them now unless they had significance.

After these optimistic deductions, the first letter was a disappointment. It didn’t even mention Randolph ’s name.

Professor Collins rambled on for two pages about the petty gossip and activities of the university. Michael knew that some of the ivory towers were rat infested, but he had forgotten how largely small malices can loom, even to a mind that is supposed to wander in the airy realms of ideas. Cheating on examinations, unexpected pregnancies, a rumor of students dabbling in black magic…Nothing was new on the campuses. There was only one name mentioned in the letter, that of a student for whom his father had high hopes. His name was not Randolph.

Puzzled and deflated, Michael put the letter aside. Maybe Galen’s secretary had made a mistake, or else Galen had told her to include all the letters dated to a particular year. He could hardly quote specific identifying details over the telephone, especially when he hadn’t read the letters for over ten years.

Michael felt sure of this hypothesis when he started the next letter and found Randolph ’s name in the opening paragraph. The context was not precisely what he had come to expect of Gordon Randolph.

“These sporadic flashes of brilliance baffle me,” his father had written of the school’s star athlete and president of the student body. “I expected great things of the boy, he’s already a school legend, but he never happened to take any of my courses until this year-which is his last. I’d say that literature simply wasn’t his field, if it weren’t for that rare outstanding essay.”