the translucent window. He pummeled his aching brain, while the polychromatic light harmonics corruscated ironically through the transparent plastic walls. His fevered eyes looked out on a black sea of velvet night and millions of splotches of cold phosphorescence. Dark air-taxis glided past on traffic beams—glided unknowingly past the imprisoned entomologist who alone out of the billions on Earth and Mars had probed the fantastic, aged secrets of the Mo-Sanshon.

He pressed his temples desperately, felt the pounding of his heart. If he’d only been able to get physical evidence of their infiltration. If they could duplicate human form, then why hadn’t any of them been captured, or have left some trace of their alien derivation?

He sagged against the wall as the photo-electric banks of the door functioned oilily, the rippling light harmonies dying to a monotone grey. Three uniformed Guards stood a moment, looking at Ward curiously while the panel closed. They were precise and mechanistic. The larger one, with an abnormally red face, said in a level, toneless voice, “Well, Doctor Ward. Are you ready?”

His vision blurred with tears as he stumbled toward them. When he stepped outside that door everything that signified Jonathan Ward would be altered. He would become a new, reconditioned personality, remembering nothing of the past he knew now, because it would no longer exist. Everything he had experienced that created the complex cause and effect mechanism of his mind would be eliminated from his psychogenes. And, like billions of other naive minions of the Solar Federation, he would be completely bewildered, surprised, horrified and subsequently annihilated or enslaved by the Mo-Sanshon.

They had stepped to either side of him. But the sound of photo-electric banks came again—from behind them—from the window. The sound was followed by a sharp, nasal voice.

“Get back against the wall, Gestapo! Unless you want to play tag with a needle-gun.”

Ward’s stunned brain turned him around warily, slowly. He stared and blinked. He saw one of the Guard’s hands dive for his service paralysis ray gun. There was a sharp thunggg from the little wiry man crouched by the open window, and an air needle punctured the Guard’s chest. He cried out feebly as he fell unmoving at Ward’s feet.

The remaining two froze in incredulous fear. The red-faced one seemed abnormally affected; his eyes bulged, face twitched. The little man, clothed in the natty pale blue garb of an 

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