the identity of the saboteur they were searching for.

She heard the gasp, then a sort of whimpering moan, and that changed even as she turned with tense sharpness, to hoarse and spasmodic laughter.

She seemed geared to any emergency, so that nothing, such as this, could be a surprise. A surprise would mean temporary indecision. She could not afford that. She turned, keeping the controls level, and raised the gun.

A man was on his knees, his hands gripping one another. His eyes and teeth protruded, and saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth. Evidently he was a civilian employee, a clerk with his anonymous brown suit and his shaven head. Someone who had felt no strong identification with the plant except that it was a job, it was security. So now that it had turned into a giant gas capsule, he had only wanted to get away from it. His eyes kept bulging as they stared at Mary. They didn't believe in Mary. He was trying to laugh away what wasn't logical. But he couldn't laugh it away.

"I was told to lay off the neuro-tabs," he whispered. "The medic told me I'd start flipping—flip, flip—he said—if I took too many neuro-tabs. He was right. I've flipped. I'm gone." Then the laughter that was not laughter really broke out all over him like a rash, and it filled the interior of the helio. "I've run away from my job when the alarm sounded!" He started screaming. "I can't go back anyway. No job—hell—I'm finished no matter what!"

He bent forward and groped for the button that would open the rear helio door. Mary lowered the gun, hoping this man's own madness would make it easier for her. Adjusting the blast so that it would kill him without releasing too much deadly kinetic energy within so small a space would be a delicate thing. It was highly dangerous.

He turned while the wind sucked at him and flapped his brown suit around his bony legs. He blinked slowly at Mary and tears ran down his cheeks. "Even if you're not real, you're the last I'll see, the last thing. So good-bye!"

The air pulled him abruptly out into its deceptive nowhere. For an instant, she felt drawn to his lonely pathway of escape. She wanted to say after him, "Good-bye," but she couldn't.

As the helio swung to the left, the rocket lifted with strange slowness, heavy and steady, on its column of fire. Reality compressed to only the helio and a narrowly restricted line between the gun and the lifting rocket.

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