heliocruiser in which Drakeson was waiting.

Greg felt the physical power flow as he ran. It sickened him. The conditioners kept the body in good shape, but only to allow the cortical-thalamic imagery faculties to function better. Actual physical business like this was revolting to any Cowl citizen. Any sort of physical and materialistic activity, divorced from anesthesia, might be a sign of encroaching psychosis.

That was the fear. That fear of psychosis that might lead to violence. To change. The Cowls over the Cities protected them from any physical interference with an absolutely stabile, unchanging and static culture. But the Cowls hadn't been able to protect the Citizenry from insanity. During the past year, psychosis had been striking increasingly, without warning, indiscriminately.

Greg dropped down beside the thin ascetic figure at the controls. He grabbed Drakeson's arm.

"Did you pick it up, Drake?"

"Uh-huh," Drakeson drawled. His mouth was cynical, his gray eyes somber. "Traced it down to a ten meter radius, but it's underground. About five miles out of Old Washington, just inside the big radioactivated forest east of the Ruins. About half an hour's flight as the crow might fly. If there was a crow left."

"Then let's go. Lift this gadget out of here!"

A spot of nausea bounced into Greg's stomach at Drakeson's reference to what the big Chain blow-up had done to almost all high cellular life forms, including crows. Only insects and a few shielded humans had withstood the radiation. Most higher complex cellular organisms had paid for their complexity. But thanks to the establishment of the Cowled Cities and the Codes of non-change, non-violence, they wouldn't have to pay again. No chance for social change now that might lead to another such disaster.

If they could only trace the cause for this psychosis epidemic—

Greg hadn't thought about it at all until Pat had started talking peculiarly, then when she had broken up completely and left the Cowl, then it had hit home, hard.

The heliocruiser lifted slowly under Drakeson's awkward guidance. Only the Controllers, the Control Council Guards, could work the gadgetry of the City with practiced ease. Everybody else, naturally, was conditioned to various anesthesia states, and had no reason to deal with materialistic things.

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