ve been detected by another telepath. It was intense and brutal.

The men fought both physically and mentally. They struggled for
possession of the stun gun, at the same time hurling emotion-charged
shafts of mental energy at each other's brains.

The struggle lasted less than a minute. Somehow, Sager managed to get
one hand on the gun, twisting it. Houston, trying to keep it out of
Sager's hand, jerked it up between them.

It coughed once, sending a beam of supersonic energy into the bodies of
both men.

The effect was the same as if they had both been crowned with baseball
bats.

* * * * *

Little pinpoints of light against a sea of darkness.

_I'm cold_, Houston thought. _And I'm sick._

He couldn't tell whether his eyes were open or closed--and he didn't
much care.

He tried to move his arms and legs, found he couldn't, and gave it up.

He blinked.

_My eyes must be open_, he thought, _if I can blink_.

Well, then, if his eyes were open, why couldn't he see anything? All he
could see were the little pinpoints of light against a background of
utter blackness.

_Like stars_, he thought.

_Stars? STARS!_

With a sudden rush, total awareness came back to him, and he realized
with awful clarity where he was.

He was chained, spread-eagled, on an asteroid in the Penal Cluster,
nearly a hundred million miles from Earth.

It was easy to piece together what had happened. He dimly remembered
that he had started to wake up once before. It was a vague, confused
recollection, but he knew what had taken place.

The PD Police, coming in response to his call, had found all four men
unconscious from the effects of the stun beam. Naturally, all of them
had been taken into custody; the PD Police had to find out which one of
the men was the Controller and which the controlled. That could easily
be tested by waiting until they began to wake up; the resulting mental
disturbances would easily identify the telepath.

Houston could imagine the consternation that must have resulted when the
PD men found that all three suspects--_and_ their brother officer--were
Controllers.

And now here he was--tried, convicted, and sentenced while he was
unconscious--doomed to spend the rest of his life chained to a rock
floating in space.

A sudden chill of terror came over him. Why wasn't he asleep? Why wasn't
he under hibernene?

_It's their way of being funny_, came a bitter thought. _We're s