that particular label, and he had saved her life, hadn't he?

He returned to the small back room, sat down again at the typer, and, after a minute, began typing again.

When he was finished, he addressed an envelope and put the letter inside.

It was signed with his legal name: Peter J. Forsythe.

It required less than two hours for that letter to end up at its destination in a six-floor brick building, a rather old-fashioned affair that stood among similar structures in a lower-middle-class section of Arlington, Virginia, hardly a hop-skip-and-jump from the Pentagon, and not much farther from the Capitol.

The letter was addressed to Mr. J. Harlan Balfour, President, The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., but Mr. Balfour was not at the Society's headquarters at the time, having been called to Los Angeles to address a group who were awaiting the Incarnation of God.

Even if he had been there, the letter wouldn't have reached him first. All mail was sent first to the office of the Executive Secretary, Mr. Brian Taggert. Most of it—somewhat better than ninety-nine per cent—went directly on to Mr. Balfour's desk, if it was so addressed; Brian Taggert would never have been so cruel as to deprive Mr. Balfour of the joy of sorting through the thousands of crackpot letters in search of those who had the true spark of mysticism which so fascinated Mr. Balfour.

Mr. Balfour was a crackpot, and it was his job to take care of other crackpots—a job he enjoyed immensely and wholeheartedly, feeling, as he did, that that sort of thing was the only reason for the Society's existence. Of course, Mr. Balfour never considered himself or the others in the least bit crackpottish, in which he was just as much in error as he was in his assumption of the Society's raison d'être.

Ninety per cent of the members of the Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research were just what you would expect them to be. Anyone who was "truly interested in the investigation of the supranormal", as the ads in certain magazines put it, could pay five dollars a year for membership, which, among other things, entitled him to the Society's monthly magazine, The Metaphysicist, a well-printed, conservative-looking publication which contained articles on everything from the latest flying saucer report to careful mathematical evaluations of the statistical methods of the Rhine Foundation. Within its 

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