gathered their lunatic brethren
and fled as they had come.

If he had known the effect the fungoids would have on them, he would
have told them that too. He had told them everything else, when he had
been snatched from a busy city street, a random specimen of humanity to
be probed and investigated.

They had chosen well. For the payment they offered him he was willing to
barter the whole human race. As far as it lay in his power he did just
that.

He was not an educated man, though he was intelligent. It was child's
play to them to strip his mind bare; but they had to know the
intangibles too, the determined will of humanity to survive, the
probabilities of the pattern of human behavior in a situation which
humanity had never before faced. He told them all he could, gladly and
willingly. He would have descended to any treachery for the vast
glittering reward they tempted him with.

It wasn't easy for the Yugoslavs to guard him and, anyway, their hearts
weren't in the task. His treachery, the ultimate treason, the betrayal
of the whole human race, was commonly known.

Inevitably the mob got him and killed three policemen in the process.
When they had sated their anger a little and the traitor had lost most
of his clothes and the thumb of his right hand, they dragged him to the
junction where the Danube meets the Sava and held him under the gray
waters with long poles, as if he was some poisonous reptile.

He lay supinely on the bed of the river and smiled evilly while a
hundred thousand people writhed in neural agony.

* * * * *

Twenty-four hours later the neural plague had spread to Zagreb and into
Albania as far as Tirana. When it crossed to Leghorn in Italy the
Balkans held twenty million lunatics and the Danube was an artificial
lake a hundred miles wide.

They had used a "clean" bomb. So they were able to bring a loudspeaker
van to its edge and boom at him to come out. He allowed them to do that
for some inscrutable reason; perhaps to demonstrate that his powers were
selective. Then it seemed he got tired of the farce, and cruel fingers
twined themselves into the nerve centers of the President of Italy and
the Prime Minister of the government of United Europe. He made them
dance a horribly twisted _pas de deux_ on the banks of the Danube for
his perverted amusement.

Then he released them, and released the millions of gibbering, twitching
idiots that inhabited Southern E