s before--was in progress
there, matching a heavily muscled Nordic with a sandy bristle of hair
against a swarthy, hairless Eurasian. The Nordic, from his twisted
stance, had a couple of broken ribs already; the Eurasian's right ear
dangled redly.

Alcorn seated himself opposite Jaffers' operative in an isolated booth
and fed the coin-slot for drinks.

"Drink," he said grimly. "You're going to be drunker, my friend, than
you've ever been in your inquisitive life."

The uproar died out before the drinks arrived. Only the blaring music
machines and the blood-roar of the telescreen remained, and a suddenly
placid bartender turned both down to a murmur.

The rest was routine to Philip Alcorn's experience. Men at the bar
turned to each other like old friends, forgetting submerged frustrations
as readily as they forgot the vicious slash-and-parry on the screen. The
place drowsed in a slow and comfortable silence.

The Jaffers man tossed off his drink and dialed another. Alcorn, raising
his own, remembered Janice Wynn's letter in his pocket and set the glass
down, untasted.

The clippings, she had said, would give him an idea of what he was up
against.

His hands shook so violently when he ripped open the envelope that he
almost dropped it.

* * * * *

Eight clippings were inside, small teleprinted scissorings from digest
newssheets that were available at any street-corner dispenser. He read
them quickly, and was more puzzled than before until he realized that
they fell into two general groups of interlocking similarities.

Four were accounts of unexplained disappearances. A moderately
successful research chemist named Ellis had vanished from the offices of
his New York chemical firm; a neighborhood pharmacist in Minneapolis, a
spinster tea-shop proprietress in Atlanta and a female social worker in
Los Angeles had disappeared with equal thoroughness, completely baffling
the efforts of police to find them.

None of these people had been of more than minor importance, even in his
own immediate circle. Alcorn felt that these events had been reported
only because the efficiency of missing-persons bureaus made permanent
disappearance next to impossible. Even so, only one clipping--that on
Ellis, the New York chemist--bothered to run a photograph.

The other four accounts dealt with violent deaths, all rising from
sudden outbreaks of mob hysteria. Two of the victims had been small-town