trousers covering the red
welts on her back and legs. The tasteless gelatin which had been her
only food since their arrival almost gagged her with every spoonful, but
she had eaten all her lunch. She needed all the strength she could get
to maintain her defiance.

She was in the grip of dull, unrelenting pain, physically and
emotionally. Her flesh ached from yesterday's beating, and she was sick
at heart at the revelation of Nuwell's essential brutality and
callousness. She had thought him a sensitive and intelligent man, and
she had admired him for this even after some of his exhibitions of
childish temper had disillusioned her as to the glowing nobility which
she had at first attributed to him.

She had felt a warm attraction to him and, when she thought Dark was
dead, she had been willing to marry him on the basis, not of the
passionate love she now felt for Dark, but of a mellow tenderness which
she conceived a sound basis for an understanding life together.

But now! She shuddered at the thought that she might have married him,
and perhaps lived all her life with him, thinking him to be gentle and
kind. Whatever happened to her, she felt fortunate that this crisis had
brought to her view the hidden side of him, that heretofore had been
seen only by his partners in political manipulation and by the
unfortunate victims of his prosecution.

Her shoulders drooped wearily. She stared across the room. It was as
bare as a prison cell, which intrinsically it was.

There was a glass on the washbasin. It was made of heavy metal, with no
sharp edges. Did Nuwell think she would commit suicide? Not as long as
she knew Dark was alive!

Her mind touched the glass. It quivered. It tilted and fell to the floor
with a clang.

She looked at it with mild curiosity as it rolled into a corner. She
hadn't done that for a long time, not since she suppressed it because of
Nuwell's hatred of witchcraft.

It was telekinesis. She had had the power since she was a child. It
seemed that she remembered using it often, and in rather startling ways,
when she was a small child with the Martians. But when she went to
Earth, she gradually stopped playing with it, except in small ways when
she was alone, because it seemed to make her elders very uncomfortable.

Telekinesis was ESP. It did not mean that she had any other ESP powers.
But there was her experience in the copter....

Her mind reached out. At once, like a shock, she was in con