completely formed in that instant.

On the outer skin of the satellite, the two of them alone, any one of a number of accidents could occur. Holding them down against the pull of centrifugal force would be only the magnetic shoes and a thin line. From that beginning, his mind went precisely to its conclusion.

"Alma," Morris Wolf said, "I'm beginning to feel very uneasy. What do we have here?"

He poured coffee into the cups on his desk.

Alma Heller looked at him shrewdly, and stirred sugar into her cup.

"I think we have a bear by the tail," she said. "We seem to peel off layers of Jim Britten's mind, and each time there's something different underneath. Every time he tells his story there is something new and contradictory in it. And there is no clue as to whether he is getting nearer or farther from the truth."

Wolf swivelled his chair around and stared out of the window onto the hospital lawn. "We thought that the deep therapy method was something perfect. Something that would make a patient tell the absolute truth as he saw it. But our patient is making hash out of it."

He lifted his coffee cup and tasted the black liquid tentatively.

"Follow it through. The first story he gave us was conscious. He said he couldn't remember exactly what happened to him. Okay. This could be a fabrication. The next story he gave under therapy conditions. He said that he killed Glover in a fit of rage because of an argument. Okay again. We could have accepted that at face value, and he would have gotten away with it, except that we got curious about a couple of things. We wondered how the paranoid tinge got into his thoughts, and we wondered exactly what it was that he and Glover were on the verge of discovering. So we tried again. Now we find that he deliberately plotted to kill Glover, and the paranoid symptoms are now so intense that he gives us a completely phony story about making millions of dollars out of the discovery, when everybody knows that you can't patent anything for personal profit when you invent it in a government laboratory."

Alma Heller lifted her hand, making a one with her forefinger. "So, our friend Jim Britten is doing two things—both of which we did not believe him capable of doing. First, he is lying and inventing stories under deep therapy. Second, he is withholding information. For notice that he is still avoiding specific mention of the result which his 

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