foibles. Like finding, on another planet in another universe, a peasant's cottage with smoke wreathing above the thatched roof and an axe wedged in a half-chopped log.

Mice scurrying at midnight in a vast cathedral—and the faint suggestion that the cathedral might not be otherwise wholly empty.

Oktav, or that which had been Oktav, oriented itself—himself—making use of the sole means of perception that functioned in the Zone. It was most akin to touch, but touch strangely extended and sensitive only to projected thought or processes akin to thought.

Groping like a man shut in an infinite closet, Oktav felt the eternal hum of the Probability Engine, the lesser hum of the seven unlocked talismans. He felt the seven human minds in their stations around the engine, felt six of them stiffen with cold disapproval as Ters made report. Then he took his own station, the last and eighth.

Ters concluded.

Prim thought, "We summoned you, Oktav, to hear your explanation of certain highly questionable activities in which you have recently indulged—only to learn that you have additionally committed an act of unprecedented negligence. Never before has a talisman been lost. And only twice has it been necessary to make an expedition to recover one—when its possessor met accidental death in a space-time world. How can you have permitted this to happen, since a talisman gives infallible warning if it is in any way spatially or temporarily parted from its owner?"

"I am myself deeply puzzled," Oktav admitted. "Some obscure influence must have been operative, inhibiting the warning or closing my mind to it. I did not become aware of the loss until I was summoned. However, casting my mind back across the last Earth-day's events, I believe I can now discern the identity of the individual into whose hands it fell—or who stole it."

"Was the talisman inert at the time?" thought Prim quickly.

"Yes," thought Oktav. "A Key-idea known only to myself would be necessary to unlock its powers."

"That is one small point in your favor," thought Prim.

"I am gravely at fault," thought Oktav, "but it can easily be mended. Lend me another talisman and I will return to the world and recover it."

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