reprieve. "It is laughable even to consider that we could be guilty of such a glaring error as you suggest. We know every crevice of space-time, every twig and leaflet. We are the masters of the Probability Engine."

"Are you?" Reckless now of all consequences, Oktav asked the unprecedented, forbidden, ultimate question. "I know when I was initiated, and presumably when the rest of you were initiated, it was always assumed and strongly suggested, though never stated with absolute definiteness, that Prim, the first of us, a mental mutant and supergenius of the nineteenth century, invented the Probability Engine. I, an awestruck neophyte, accepted this attitude. But now I know that I never really believed it. No human mind could ever have conceived the Probability Engine. Prim did not invent it. He merely found it, probably by chancing on a lost talisman. Thereafter some peculiarity of the Engine permitted him to take it out of reach of its true owners, hide it from them. Then he took us in with him, one by one, because a single mind was insufficient to operate the Engine in all its phases and potentialities. But Prim never invented it. He stole it."

With a sense of exultation, Oktav realized that he had touched their primal vulnerability—though at the same time insuring his own doom. He felt the seven resentful, frightened minds converge upon him suffocatingly. He probed now for one thing only—any relaxing of watchfulness, any faltering of awareness, on the part of any one of them. And as he probed, he kept choking out additional insults against the resistance.

"Is there any one of you, Prim included, who even understands the Probability Engine, let alone having the capacity to devise it?

"You prate of science, but do you understand even the science of modern Earthlings? Can any one of you outline to me the theoretic background of subtronic physics? Even your puppets have outstripped you. You're atavisms, relics of the Dawn Civilization, mental mummies, apes crept into a factory at night and monkeying with the machinery.

"You're sorcerer's apprentices—and what will happen when the sorcerer comes back? What if I should stop this eternal whispering and send a call winging clear and unhampered through eternity: 'Oh sorcerer, True Owners, here is your stolen Engine'?"

They pressed on him frantically, frightenedly, as if by sheer mental weight to prevent any such call being sent. He felt that he would go down under the pressure, cease to be. But at the same time his 

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