e, ever so slightly, certain
international laws so that he will profit by them. Do you follow?"

"I follow," said Houston.

"Good. It has taken painstaking research and a great deal of
psychological statistical analysis, but we have found that one
company--and one company only--benefits by these legal changes. Did you
ever hear of Lasser & Sons?"

"Sure," said Houston. "They're in the import-export business, with a few
fingers in shipping and air transport."

"That's them," said Reinhardt. "Someone in that company, presumably
someone at the top, is a Controller. And he's a very subtle, very
dangerous man. Unlike the others, there is nothing hasty or overt in his
plans. But within a few years, if this goes on, he will have more power
than the others ever dreamed of."

"And my job is to get him?" Houston asked.

Reinhardt nodded. "That's it. Get him. One way or another. You're in
charge; I don't care how you do it, but this one Controller is more
dangerous than any other we've come across, so get him."

Houston nodded slowly. "Okay. Can you give me all the data you have so
far?"

Reinhardt patted a heavy folder on his desk. "It's all here." Then he
tapped the projected map on the screen. "That's the Lasser
Building--Church Street at Worth. Somewhere in there is the man we're
looking for."

* * * * *

David Houston spent the next six weeks gathering facts, trying to
determine the identity of the mysterious Controller at Lasser & Sons.
Slowly, the evidence began to pile up.

At the same time, he worried over his own problem. Who was betraying
non-criminal Controllers to the PD Police?

In that six-week period, two more men and a woman were arrested--one in
Spain, one in India, and one in Hawaii.

There weren't very many Controllers on Earth, percentagewise. Of the
three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated
one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand
total of some thirty-five thousand people.

Spread, as they were, all over the planet, it was rare that one
Controller ever met another. The intelligent ones didn't use their
power; they remained concealed, even from each other.

But _someone_, somewhere, was finding them and betraying them to the
Psychodeviant Police.

As more and more data came in on the Lasser case, Houston began to get
an idea. If there were a really clever, highly intelligent, megalomaniac
Controller, wouldn'