the same. Here and there, the mouths of branch corridors came in.

He looked at his hand. It still clutched the butt of the heat-blaster.

He felt strange. The surroundings were very real, yet they seemed somehow not real. The shock of trying to fire that blaster when the sanity in him shrieked "No!" had been too much for him. The shock had blanked him out.

He breathed a deep sigh of temporary relief and triumph. He hadn't killed. He thought of Drakeson. Somebody had saved him. Someone had killed. Not the Controllers. They could employ only the neuro-guns to paralyze. So he decided that Colonists had probably saved Drakeson.

Terror gripped Greg then. He remembered Drakeson yelling at him, the distended eyes, the straining face. And how he himself had almost given in, had almost killed.

Had almost gone psycho.

But he hadn't. That was the important thing. He was still a sane, integrated part of the Cowls and the Codes. And after a test like that, he figured that nothing could break him. Let them send him to psychometry. Let them clamp on the brain-probers and leave them on for months. They'd not find any psycho tendencies in Greg Dalson.

Greg tried to reason. But he had no place, no foundation, for a beginning. He didn't know where he was, or why he had been left here. He knew that someone, the Colonists probably, had saved Drakeson from that plant thing. Some mental pressure had blacked him out, he thought, and then what? He didn't know.

Which way? It didn't seem to matter. He started walking.

He was bone-weary. His head throbbed. His eyes burned. And he was afraid. He had gotten himself into a completely un-Codified situation. He was lost, helpless, outside the protection of the Cowls, the Codes, and anesthesia.

He was surrounded by reality. Reality in all its essential horror. Conflict. Physical danger. Uncertainties. Materialistic barriers. All the old shibboleths that the Cowls and the Codes and the anesthetic dreams had protected him from.

And all because of Pat Nichols.

But he'd stood a big test. And he'd won. He hadn't killed. He wasn't destructive. He—

The cry touched his ears and died. It was too violent and filled with pain 

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