was
balding on top. Both men were in their middle thirties.

"I don't understand this jinx, myself," Luvochek said. "At first, it
was just little things, but the accidents got worse and worse. And
then, when the Monster blew--" He stopped and shook his head slowly.
"I'd suspect sabotage, except that there was never any sign of
tampering with the equipment I saw."

"What do you think of the sabotage idea?" Bessermann asked MacHeath.

MacHeath shrugged. "Haven't seen any signs of it."

"Run of bad luck," said Luvochek. "That's all."

As they talked MacHeath absorbed the patterns of thought that wove in
and out in the two men's minds. Both men were more open than Dr.
Nordred; they were easier for MacHeath to understand. Nowhere was
there any thought of guilt--at least, as far as sabotage was
concerned.

MacHeath drank his coffee slowly and thoughtfully, keeping up his part
of the three-way conversation while he concentrated on his own
problem.

One thing was certain: Nowhere in the minds of any of the personnel of
the Redford Project was there any conscious knowledge of sabotage. Not
even in the mind of Konrad Bern.

Dr. Roger Kent, a tall, lantern-jawed sad-eyed man in his forties, had
been hard to get through to at first, but as soon as MacHeath
discovered that the hard block Kent had built up around himself was
caused by grief over a wife who had been dead five years, he became as
easy to read as a billboard. Kent had submerged his grief in work; the
eternal drive of the true scientist to drag the truth out of Mother
Nature. He was constitutionally incapable of sabotaging the very
instruments that had been built to dig in after that truth.

Dr. Konrad Bern, on the other hand, was difficult to read below the
preconscious stage. Science, to him, was a form of power, to be used
for "idealistic" purposes. He was perfectly capable of sabotaging the
weapons of an enemy if it became necessary, whether that meant ruining
a physical instrument or carefully falsifying the results of an
experiment. Outwardly, he was a pleasant enough chap, but his mind
revealed a rigidly held pattern of hatreds, fears, and twisted
idealism. He held them tightly against the onslaughts of a hostile
world.

And that meant that he couldn't possibly have any control over
whatever psionic powers he may have had.

Unless--

Unless he was so expert and so well-trained that he was better than
anything the S.M.M.R. had ever known.

MacHea