Like a mote in the grip of an intangible whirlwind, Clawly whipped through the gray dawn on a steady surge of subtronic power toward the upper levels of the Blue Lorraine. The brighter stars, and Mars, were winking out. Through the visor of his flying togs the rushing air sent a chill to which his blood could not quite respond. He should be home, recuperating from defeat, planning new lines of attack. He should be letting fatigue poisons drain normally from his plasma, instead of knocking them out with stimulol. He should be giving his thoughts a chance to unwind. Or he should have given way to lurking apprehensions and be making a frantic search for Thorn. But the itch of a larger worry was upon him, and until he had done a certain thing, he could not pursue personal interests, or rest.

With Thorn gone, his rebuff in the Sky Room loomed as a black and paralyzingly insurmountable obstacle that grew momently higher. They were lucky, he told himself, not to have had their present research funds curtailed—let alone having them increased, or being given a large staff of assistants, or being granted access to the closely guarded files of confidential information on cryptic amnesiacs and other citizens. Any earlier culture would probably have forbidden their research entirely, as a menace to the mental stability of the public. Only an almost fetishlike reverence for individual liberty and the inviolability of personal pursuits, had saved them.

The Committee's adverse decision had even shaken his own beliefs. He felt himself a puny little man, beset by uncertainties and doubts, quite incompetent to protect the world from dangers as shadowy, vast, and inscrutable as the gloom-drenched woodlands a mile below.

Why the devil had Thorn left the meeting like that, of necessity creating a bad impression? Surely he couldn't have given way to any luring hypnotic impulse—he of all men ought to know the danger of that. Still, there had been that unpleasant suggestion of sleepwalking in his departure—an impression that Clawly's memory kept magnifying. And Thorn was a strange fellow. After all these years, Clawly still found him unpredictable. Thorn had a spiritual recklessness, an urge to plumb all mental deeps. And God knows there were deeps enough for plumbing these days, if one were foolish. Clawly felt them in himself—the faint touch of a darker, less pleasant version of his own personality, against which he must keep constantly on guard.

If he had let something happen to Thorn—!

A variation in the terrestrial magnetic field, not 

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