"You're all insane! Look at you! The four of you, siding with a man who has betrayed us to the Normals! He—"

What Sager thought of Houston couldn't be put into words, and if it could no sane person would want to repeat the mad foulness in those words.

"This is unbearable!" Sonali thought softly.

"That's not a mind," said Dorrine, "it's a sewer."

"I suggest," said Matsukuo, "that we do a little probing. Let's find out what makes this thing tick."

"Stay out of my mind!" Sager screamed. "You have no right!"

"You seemed to think you had the right to probe into the helpless minds of Normals," said Juan Pedro coldly. "We should show you how it feels."

"But they're just animals!" Sager retorted. "I am a Controller!"

"You're a madman," said Matsukuo. "And we must find out what makes you mad."

Synchronizing perfectly, five minds began to probe at the walls that Sager had built up around his personality. And as they probed, Sager retreated behind ever thicker walls, howling in hatred and anguish.

On and on went the five, needling, pressing at every weak spot, trying to break him down. Outnumbered and overpowered, it seemed as though Sager had no chance.

But his insanity was stronger than they suspected. The barriers he built were harder, more opaque, and more impenetrable than any they had ever seen. The five pushed on, anyway, but their advance slowed tremendously.

Then, mentally, there was a sudden silence.

Sager? they thought.

No answer.

"That's finished it," said Houston. "He's retreated so far behind those mental barriers that he's cut himself off completely."

"He's not dead, is he?" Dorrine asked.

"Dead?" said Juan Pedro. "Not in the sense you mean. But I think he is catatonic now; he has lost all touch with the outside. He is as though he were still drugged; he is physically helpless, and mentally blanked out."

"There's one difference," Matsukuo said analytically. "And that is that, although he has cut himself off from us 

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