ppression of that knowledge--badly enough to
kill the psychiatrist for it?

Jaffers, or the faceless people behind Janice Wynn?

It had to be Jaffers, he decided, eliminating a possible source of
opposition and at the same stroke placing himself still further on the
defensive.

Slowly, he became aware that the joy-bar had fallen quiet, that everyone
in the place was watching him with a sort of intent sympathy. The
bartender left his place and came toward him, his heavy face a study in
concern.

"We know you couldn't have done it," the man said. The sway of Alcorn's
presence held him hypnotized. "Can we help?"

Alcorn's only thought was of flight. "Have you a turbo-copter?"

"On the roof," the bartender said. "It's yours."

Alcorn took him along to unlock the controls. On the roof landing, a
cool evening wind was blowing. There was a dim thin sickle of moon and a
pale haze of stars, a wraithlike scattering of small white clouds that
drifted in the reflected spectrum of the city's multicolored glow.

He sat in the turbo-copter with a feeling of incredulous unreality. The
vast and shining breadth of the city was spread about him like a
monstrous alien puzzle, a light-shot maze without meaning. Where, in
that suddenly foreign tangle, could he go?

He set the 'copter off at random, knowing that its owner would have the
police on his heels the moment he recovered volition. Alcorn was still
trying to settle upon a course when a seizure fell upon him again.

First he had seen the city as something alien; now he felt it, a
clamorous surf-roar of conflicting individual emotions, an unresolved
ant-hill scurrying of hates and hopes and endless frustrations.

Then he was on the polar plain. The pit and scaffolding were the same,
but the enigmatic groupings of people on the streets had changed. Four
of them had faces now. Three were unfamiliar, but the fourth he
recognized as Ellis, the research chemist who had disappeared from his
laboratory in New York City.

* * * * *

By the time Alcorn was composed, he discovered that he had chosen a
course without conscious intent. Dark, open country fled past beneath,
pricked here and there with racing points of light that marked the main
artery of northward surface traffic. Familiar mountain shapes loomed
ahead, indicating where he was bound.

He was heading, lemminglike, for his cabin in the Catskills.

The knowledge made him wonder if he coul