unknown figures. The building
of years melting like a sugar castle melts into the tide--the
invisible army that had obeyed his sourceless voice without being able
to blackmail or rebel, the perfectly balanced tool in his hands that
could be used for the bribing of venal politicians, with a limitless
fund for the bribery, the growing secret control of the most venal of
the political machines of Earth, that by the time he needed it it
would have been an irresistible weapon in his hand for the single
swift political blow that would rip the Belt from Earth control, and
give it a seat on the Assembly of the Federated Nations, and mastery
of the solar system--

But as he sat there the organization dissolved.

He grasped the phone, but there was nobody to call now, no one would
answer. He could never reach them again.

This was sanity now, but what had it been before when he was
cheerfully destroying his future? It seemed to him that there were two
halves to his brain, each wanting different things. For a moment the
one that had controlled the day was gone, and he was sane again, but
how long would that moment last? What sign had there been when it took
control? Would he know it when it came again?

He remembered that in the tube train that morning he and Pierce had
had a half joking argument about the best short-and-merry life. One of
the happy ones on the list had been the INC agent, because they spent
so much of their lives working into smuggling gangs that they had all
the pleasures and profits of being a crook and an honest man too. Was
that where he had slipped his cog?

Looking back on the things he had done that day he saw that much of it
had fitted an abstract pattern of justice, as if he had been thinking
of himself as an INC man. Or as if--

He thought of the things he had seen in his childhood that they had
called zombies, and jeered at and tormented without fear of any
retaliation or vengeance from their gray-faced victims. Imprisoned
men--they looked normal--but they had been mentally imprisoned.
Law-zombies, memorizing and following laws and being honest with a
simple and terrifying literalness.

He had not known that he had any capacity for terror.

Bryce Carter. He had his name, his identity and his memory, and they
were his own. Sometimes he had had nothing else, only the pride and
strength of knowing his identity, that it was his and stronger than
others, just as his hands were stronger, a thing t