ape
anyone?" Weiss asked.

"The barbershop in any small town is a good central location for
keeping track of goings-on in town. I think that's all he had in
mind--besides the fact that barbering was his trade. If Vince Lardner
hadn't needed an assistant, he probably would have moved into one of
the summer colonies, or gotten some other kind of job. We can't be
sure."

Rick asked, "Are there any machines in existence besides these two and
the missing one from the train?"

"We don't know. But it doesn't matter. The enemy now knows we're onto
the system and can't expect to get away with it again. Besides, Dr.
Winston says a countermeasure is easily arranged, to be used when we
suspect the mind readers might make another try."

"Who are these people?" Jan demanded.

Steve grinned. "Unfriendly agents. Seriously, Jan, we aren't sure
about their employers. It will take some backbreaking investigation to
get the whole story, because the files show nothing on any of them.
That means they were deep-cover agents, kept hidden until there was
something important enough to bring them out. We may never get the
whole story."

"Won't they talk?" Scotty asked.

"They haven't yet. They may. But, anyway, we'd have to check on their
stories. Any other questions? Okay, I'm finished. Dr. Winston will
take over at this point."

The cyberneticist came to the front of the room. "We have something
here," he stated, "but we don't yet know what it is. And, curiously
enough, from the crude nature of the machines, I doubt that the enemy
knows, either. If we have to speculate--and I guess we do--we might
guess that sometime, in an enemy EEG laboratory, some experiment
resulted in a subject having his mind erased. It was probably an
accident that the enemy exploited without knowing how it worked."

"Can't we even guess how it works?" Weiss asked.

"Approximately, without knowing the physiology of it. The EEG
recording is simply fed into a gadget that modulates a carrier wave.
The carrier is an average frequency for brain patterns. In effect, the
thing simply transmits the man's own pattern back to him. Why that
should produce trauma of the kind we have seen is a mystery." The
scientist gestured to the TV receiver. "The transmitter is
incorporated into the TV chassis, and the 'rabbit ears' act as an
antenna when adjusted properly. The recorder is a simple EEG
mechanism."

Winston smiled. "You may be sure we're not through with this
appa