page of type that appeared on the screen. "I read you. Thanks. Clearing."

"Coffee, chef," said Midge resignedly. "And two ham sandwiches." She came over and sat beside Samson. "Hold that page till I finish it."

Samson was a man with an open mind, a faculty which served him well in dealing with the weird and wild inhabitants of many planets in Slice 103, but which, it occurred to him, was not just the thing wanted for the task in hand. He kept his misgivings to himself, however, and aided by numerous steaming pots of coffee served up by the ship's autochef, bored his way determinedly through the twenty tubes of surmise, conjecture and hearsay provided by Lubyanka Archives. Midge, who had a female-superiority complex, sat and took it alongside him, cube for cube.

When they had finished, as Midge took the trouble to remind him, they had learned next to nothing that wasn't in the Slice 103 manual. "A total loss, wasn't it?" she demanded.

"Sure. Just a precaution; there might have been something in there that the manual skipped. If it doesn't rain one Sunday, do you give up wearing waterproofs?"

Midge's expression indicated that the question deserved no answer. "You've had your information—now have you got any ideas?"

"Well," said Samson reflectively, "Harlow seems to think there's some kind of compulsion involved, maybe hypnotic. I don't see how we can exclude the possibility, even though that kind of contact between alien minds is supposed to be impossible. But I've got a hunch that's not it. I think maybe they simply talked to Jackson—they convinced him—and he did the same to the seventeen that followed him."

"In my own fumbling way," said Midge, "I got that far three hours ago. Because if it was compulsion of any kind, why did it only work on seventeen out of twenty-two? I even made a stab at answering another little technical question—why didn't Jackson use the communicator?"

"That's easy enough," said Samson. "If you got a call from somebody you didn't know, and he started spouting pseudo-religious propaganda at you, would you listen quietly until he was finished, or would you cut him off and complain to the Privacy Commission? And if he'd called anybody who knew him—you or Harlow, for example—we would have smelled something. Jackson might have found himself cut off before he ever left Kenilworth, if he'd tried that. He couldn't take the chance."

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