suddenly brimming with mental images of the seven
months, while he worked on the mathematics to tie down the strange
pattern of brain waves the old professor had found in the minds of
those who had the mysterious psi factor. Dan had worked with them, in
the little cluttered apartment, building the apparatus they needed. It
was through Dan that Ellen was hired, as a general assistant and
secretary.

There had been only the four of them, working in deepest secrecy in
the three rooms which the government had felt were more suitable to
maintain complete security than any deeply buried laboratory could
have been. Ellen made a pretense of living there, and it was a
neighborhood where no landlady worried about the men who went to a
girl's place, provided everything was quiet.

They'd succeeded, too--they had found the tiny bundle of cells that
controlled the psi factor, and learned to stimulate them by artificial
wave trains and hypnosis. But the small group in the top division of
the government to whom they were responsible had demanded more proof.

* * * * *

Hawkes had treated himself secretly, not knowing that Meinzer had done
the same two days before. And both had learned the same thing. The
wild talents appeared, but they couldn't be controlled. Meinzer hadn't
found security in the hospital, hard as he'd tried to find it. He'd
gotten up in the middle of the night and walked through the solid
wall, unable to stop until he was back with the group.

Hawkes had tried another way to stop the wild abilities that operated
without his conscious control. He'd prepared a new hypnotic tape,
worded to make him forget everything he knew, or even the fact that he
had worked on the psi factor. He'd put in commands that would make him
avoid any reference to it, so that he couldn't learn accidentally.
He'd ordered his brain to have nothing to do with it. Then he'd
drugged himself with a combination of opiates and hypnotics that
should have knocked out a horse. Then he'd telephoned Dan to have men
pick him up in an hour and keep him drugged. He'd turned on the tape
recorder and stumbled back to the bed.

He groaned, as he remembered his failure. "It's the ultimate, absolute
alien, all right--the back of a man's own mind. It's Freud's
unconsciousness, or id. The psi factor is controlled by that, and not
by the conscious mind. And the id is a primitive beast--it operates on
raw impulse, without reason