"All right, then. I'll rely on your oaths as medical men not to put me through erasure until you've probed that mutiny fully. Well?"

"Okay, Mannion. We'll take a look. But if it's not as you say—"

"I'll take my chances," Mannion said. He felt cold and uncertain inside. He didn't know what they'd find. He didn't even know whether they'd keep their word and probe him before the erasure.

He put the gun down on a lab table. "Here," he said. "Here's my gun. Now let's see how good your oath is."

The only trouble with that was he might never see how good it was.

"Just relax," the technician said. "The probe is entering your mind, now. Just relax...."

Mannion sank downward into the soft, warm darkness that enfolded him. He was moving back into his own past now, gently guided along by the mind-probe—

WHAM!

It was like walking full-tilt into a mountainside. Some obstruction in his mind, no doubt.

But the probe bored its way through, drilled through the hard barrier of amnesia in his mind.

And suddenly he was back on Iapetus, in Project Headquarters.

He was saying, "Commander Dubrow, the androids running the atmosphere-generators are lying down on the job. They don't seem to be working."

Dubrow glared at him coldly. "Stick to your own job, Lieutenant Mannion. Coleridge is supervising the androids out there."

"No, he isn't! Coleridge isn't there."

"He must be there, Lieutenant."

"Commander, I'm going out there to see what's wrong. Those androids have been acting up strangely all day and I don't like it."

"I order you to stay here!" Dubrow snapped.

"But—"

Hesitantly Mannion took a few steps toward the airlock. The androids outside were sauntering casually around like unemployed thieves. It wasn't a natural way for androids to behave.

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