Kinnison finished his second cup of Tellurian coffee, got up from the breakfast table, and prowled about in black abstraction. Twenty-odd years had changed him but little. He weighed the same, or a few pounds less; although a little of his mass had shifted downward from his mighty chest and shoulders. His hair was still brown, his stern face was only faintly lined. He was mature, with a conscious maturity which no young man can know.

"Since when, Kim, did you think that you could get away with blocking me out of your mind?" Clarrissa Kinnison directed the thought, quietly. The years had dealt as lightly with the Red Lensman as with the Gray. She had been gorgeous, she was now magnificent. "This room is shielded, you know, against even the girls."

"Sorry, Chris—I didn't mean it that way."

"I know," she laughed. "Automatic. But you've had that block up for two solid weeks, except when you force yourself to keep it down, and that means that you're 'way, 'way off the beam."

"I've been thinking, incredible as it may seem."

"I know it. Let's have it—cold."

"QX—you asked for it. Queer things have been going on all over. Inexplicable things ... no apparent reason."

"Such as?"

"Almost any kind of insidious deviltry you care to name. Disaffections, psychoses, mass hysterias, hallucinations; pointing toward a Civilization-wide epidemic of revolutions and uprisings for which there seems to be no basis or justification whatever."

"Why, Kim! How could there be? I haven't heard of anything like that!"

"It hasn't got around. Each solar system thinks that it's a purely local condition, but it isn't. As Galactic Co-ordinator, with a broad view of the entire picture, my office would, of course, see such a thing before anyone else could. We saw it, and set out to nip it in the bud ... but—" He shrugged his shoulders and grinned wryly.

"But what?" Clarrissa persisted.

"It didn't nip. We sent Lensmen to investigate, but none of them got to the first check-station. Then I asked our Second-Stage Lensmen—Worsel, Nadreck, and Tregonsee—to drop whatever they were doing and solve it for me. They struck it and bounced. They followed, and are still following, leads and 

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