The Game-Players Of Titan

XV

AT TEN O'CLOCK that night they met in the group condominium apartment in Carmel. First came Silvanus Angst, this time—for perhaps the first time in his life—sober and silent, but as always carrying a paper bag containing a fifth of whiskey. He set it on the sideboard and turned to Pete and Carol Garden who followed him.

"I just can't see letting Psis in," Angst murmured. "I mean, you're talking about something that'll make Game-playing impossible forever."

Bill Calumine said drily, "Wait until everyone's here." His tone, to Angst, was unfriendly. "I want to meet the two of them," he said to Pete, "before I decide. The girl and the pre-cog, who, I understand, is on Jerome Luckman's staff back in New York." Although now voted out as spinner, Calumine automatically assumed the position of authority. And perhaps it was well he did, Pete reflected.

"That's right," Pete murmured absently. At the sideboard he looked to see what Silvanus Angst had brought. Canadian whiskey, this time, and very good. Pete got himself a glass, held it under the ice machine.

"Thank you sir," the ice machine piped.

Pete mixed himself a drink, his back to the room as it slowly, steadily, filled with people. Their murmuring voices came to him.

"And not just one Psi but two!"

"Yes, but the issue involved; it's patriotic."

"So what. Game-playing ends when Psis comes in."

"It can be with the proviso that they terminate as Bindmen as soon as this fracas with the—what're they called? The Woo Poo Non? Something like that, according to the Chronicle this evening. Anyhow, the vug firebrands. You know. The ones we thought we beat."

"You saw that article? The homeopape system at the Chronicle inferred that it's been these Woo Poo Noners who've kept our goddam birthrate down."

"Implied."

"Pardon?"

"You said 'inferred.' That's grammatically unsound."

"Anyhow, my point is, without quibbling, is that it's our duty to let these two Psi-people into Pretty Blue Fox. That vug detective, that E. B. Black, told us that it was to our national advantage to—"

"You believe him? A vug?"

"He's a good vug. Didn't you grasp that point?" Stuart Marks tapped Pete urgently on the shoulder. "That was the whole point you were trying to make to us, wasn't it?"

"I don't know," Pete said. He really didn't, now. He was worn-out. Let me drink my drink in peace, the thought, and turned his back once more on the roomful of arguing men and women. He wished Joe Schilling would arrive.

"Let them in this once, I say. It's for our own protection; we're not playing against each other, we're all on the same side in this, playing against the vug-bugs. And they can read our minds so they automatically win unless we can come up with something new. And anything new would have to be derived from the two Psi-people, right? Because where else is it going to come from? Straight ozone?"

"We can't play against vugs. They'll just laugh at us. Look, they got six of us right here in this room to gang together and kill Jerome Luckman; if they can do that—"

"Not me. I wasn't one of the six."

"But it could have been. They just didn't happen to choose you."

"Anyhow, if you read the article in the homeopape you know the vugs mean business. They slaughtered Luckman and that detective Hawthorne and kidnapped Pete Garden and then—"

"But newspapers exaggerate."

"Aw, there's no use talking to you." Jack Blau stalked away; he appeared beside Pete and said, "When are they getting here? These two Psi-people."

Pete said, "Any time now."

Coming up, slipping her smooth, bare arm through his, Carol said, "What are you drinking, darling?"

"Canadian whiskey."

"Everyone's been congratulating me," Carol said. "About the baby. Except of course Freya. And I think even she would, except—"

"Except she can't stand the idea," Pete said.

"Do you actually think it's been the vugs—or at least a segment of them—who've been keeping our birthrate down?"

"Yes," Pete said.

"So if we win, our birthrate might go up."

He nodded.

"And our cities would have something in them besides a billion Rushmore circuits all saying, 'Yes sir, no sir.'" Carol squeezed his arm.

Pete said, "And if we don't win, there pretty soon won't be any births on our planet at all. And the race will die out."

"Oh." She nodded wanly.

"It's a big responsibility," Freya Garden Gaines said, from behind him. "To hear you tell it, anyhow."

Pet shrugged.

"And Joe was on Titan, too? You both were?"

"Joe and I and Laird Sharp," Pete said.

"Instantly."

"Yes."

"Quaint," Freya said.

Pete said, "Get away."

"I'm not going to vote to admit the two Psi-people," Freya said. "I can tell you that now, Pete."

"You're an idiot, Mrs. Gaines," Laid Sharp said; he had been standing nearby, listening. "I can tell you that, at least. Anyhow, I think you'll be outvoted."

"You're fighting against a tradition," Freya said. "People don't lightly and easily set aside one hundred years."

"Not even to save their species?" Laird Sharp asked her.

"No one's seen these Game-playing Titans except Joe Schilling and you," Freya said. "Even Pete doesn't claim to have seen them."

"They exist," Sharp said quietly. "And you'd better believe it. Because soon you're going to see them, too."

Carrying his glass, Pete walked through the apartment and outside, into the cool California evening air; he stood

by himself in the semi-darkness, his drink in his hand, waiting. He did not know for what. For Joe Schilling and Mary Anne to arrive? Perhaps that was it.

Or perhaps it was for something else, something even more meaningful to him than that. I'm waiting for The Game to begin, he said to himself. The last Game we Terrans may ever play.

He was waiting for the Titanian Game-players to arrive.

He thought, Patricia McClain is dead, but in a sense she never really existed; what I saw was a simulacrum, a fake. What I was in love with, if that's the proper word ... it wasn't there anyhow, so how can I really say I've lost it? You have to possess it first to lose it.

Anyhow we can't think about that, he decided. We've got other matters to worry about. Doctor Philipson said that the Game-players are moderates; it's an irony that what we ultimately have to defeat is not the fringe of extremists but the great center group itself. Maybe it's just as well; we're taking on the core of their civilization, vugs not like E. G. Philipson but more like E. B. Black. The reputable ones. The ones who play by the rules.

That's all we can count on, Pete realized, the fact that these players are law-abiding. If they weren't, if they were like Philipson and the McClains—

We would not be facing them across a Game-board. They would simply kill us, as they killed Luckman and Hawthorne, and that would be that.

A car descended, now, its headlights flashing; it came to rest at the curb, behind the other cars, and its lights switched off. The door opened and shut and a single figure, a man, came striding toward Pete.

Who was this? He strained to see, not recognizing him.

"Hi," the man said. "I dropped by. After I read the article in the homeopape. It looks interesting, here. No fnool, I say, buddy-friend. Correct?"

"Who are you?" Pete said.

The man said coolly, "You don't recognize me? I thought everyone knew who I am. Awop, awop woom. May I sit in on your group, tonight. Buddy, buddy, buddy; I know I'd enjoy it." He approached the porch, stood now beside Pete,

his movements confident and alert, hand extended. "I'm Nats Katz."

Bill Calumine said, "Of course you can sit in on our Game, Mr. Katz. It's an honor to have you here." He waved the members of Pretty Blue Fox into momentary silence. "This is the world-renowned disc jokey and recording star Nats Katz, whom we all watch on TV; he's asked to sit in on our meeting tonight. Does anybody mind?"

The group was watching, uncertain how to react.

What was it Mary Anne had said about Katz? Pete thought. Is Nats Katz the center of all this? he had asked her. And she had said yes. And, at the time, it had seemed true.

Pete said, "Wait."

Turning, Bill Calumine said, "Surely there's no valid reason to object to this man's presence here. I can't believe you'd seriously—"

"Wait until Mary Anne gets here," Pete said. "Let her decide about Katz."

"She's not even a part of the group," Freya Gaines said.

There was silence.

"If he comes in," Pete said, "I go out."

"Out where?" Calumine said.

Pete said nothing.

"A girl who isn't even part of our group—" Calumine began.

"What's your basis for opposing him?" Stuart Marks asked Pete. "Is it rational? Something you are able to express?" They were all watching him, now, wondering what his reason was.

Pete said, "We're in a much worse position than any of you realize. There's very little chance that we can win against our opponents."

"So?" Stuart Marks said. "What's that have to do—"

"I think," Pete said, "that Katz is on their side."

After a moment Nats Katz laughed. He was handsome, dark, with sensuous lips and strong, intelligent eyes. "That's a new one," he said. "I've been accused of just about everything, but hardly that. Awop woom! I was born in Chicago, Mr. Garden. I assure you; I'm a Terran. Woom, woom, woom!" His round, animated face radiated a potent cheer-

fulness. Katz did not seem offended, only surprised. "What will you see, my birth certificate? You know, buddy-friend Garden woom, I really am well-known here and there, no fnool. If I were a vug it probably would have come to light before now. Wouldn't you think? Correct?"

Pete sipped his drink; his hands, he found, were shaking. Have I lost contact with reality? he asked himself. Maybe so. Maybe I never fully recovered from my binge, my temporary psychotic interlude. Am I the person to judge about Katz?

Should I be here at all? he wondered.

Maybe this is the end for me, he said to himself. Not for them; for me. Personally. At last.

Aloud, he said, "I'm going out. I'll be back later." Turning, he set his drink glass down and left the room; he descended the porch steps and arrived at his car. Getting in, he slammed the door and sat in silence for a long, long time.

Maybe I'm more of a detriment to the group than an asset at this point, he said to himself. He lit a cigarette, then abruptly dropped it into the disposal chute of the car. For all I know, Nats might even come up with the idea we need; he's an imaginative guy.

Someone was standing on the porch, calling him; the voice drifted to him faintly. "Hey, Pete, what're you doing? Come on back inside!"

Pete started up the car. "Let's go," he ordered it.

"Yes, Mr. Garden." The car moved forward, then lifted from the pavement, skimmed above the other parked cars, beep-beeping, then above the rooftops of Carmel; at last, it headed toward the Pacific, a quarter mile west.

All I have to do, Pete thought idly, is give it the command to land. Because in another minute we'll be over water.

Would the Rushmore circuit do that? Probably.

"Where are we?" he asked it, to see if it knew.

"Over the Pacific Ocean, Mr. Garden."

"What would you do," he said, "If I asked you to set down?"

There was a moment of silence. "Call Doctor Macy at—" It hesitated; he heard the unit clicking, trying different combinations. "I would set down," it decided. "As instructed."

It had chosen. Had he?

I shouldn't be this depressed, he told himself." I shouldn't be doing things like this; it isn't reasonable.

But he was.

For a time he managed to look down at the dark water below. And then, with a turn of the tiller, he steered the car into a wide arc until it was skimming back toward land. This way isn't for me, Pete said to himself. Not the ocean. I'll pick up something at the apartment, something I can take; a bottle or so of phenobarbital, maybe. Or Emphytal.

He flew above Carmel, going north, and presently his car was passing above South San Francisco. And a few minutes later he was over Marin County. San Rafael lay directly ahead. He gave the Rushmore circuit the instructions to land at his apartment building; settling back, he waited.

"Here we are, sir." The car bumped the curb slightly. The motor clicked itself off; the car dutifully opened its door.

Pete stepped out, walked to the building door, put his key in the lock and then entered.

Upstairs, he reached the door of his and Carol's apartment; the door was unlocked and he opened it and passed on inside.

The lights were on. In the living room a lanky, middle-aged man sat in the center of the couch, legs crossed, reading the Chronicle.

"You forget," the man said, tossing the newspaper down, "that a pre-cog previews every possibility that he's later going to know about. And a suicide on your part would be big news." Dave Mutreaux rose to his feet, hands in his pockets; he seemed completely at ease. "This would be an especially unfortunate time for you to kill yourself, Garden."

"Why?" Pete demanded.

Mutreaux said quietly, "Because if you don't, you're on the verge of finding an answer to the Game-problem. The answer to how one bluffs a race of telepaths. I can't give it to you; only you can think it up. But it's going to be there. Not, however, if you're dead ten minutes from now." He nodded in the direction of the bathroom and its medicine cabinet. "I've done a little rigging along the lines of the alternate future I'd like to see become actual; while I've

been here I've disposed of your pills. The medicine cabinet is empty."

Pete went at once into the bathroom and looked.

Not even the aspirin remained. He saw only bare shelves.

To the medicine cabinet he said, angrily, "You let him do this?"

Its Rushmore Effect answered cringingly, "He said it was for your own good, Mr. Garden. And you know how you are when you're depressed."

Slamming the cabinet door, Pete walked back into the living room.

"You've got me, Mutreaux," he conceded. "At least in one respect. The way I had in mind—"

"You can find some other way, of course," Mutreaux said calmly. "But emotionally you lean toward suicide by oral means. Poisons, narcotics, sedatives, hypnotics and so forth." He smiled. "There's a resistance to doing it by any other means. For instance, by dropping into the Pacific."

Pete said, "Can you tell me anything about my solution to the Game-playing problem?"

"No," Mutreaux said. "I can't. That's entirely up to you."

"Thanks," Pete said sardonically.

"Ill tell you one thing, however. A hint. One which may cheer you or it may not. I can't preview it because you aren't going to show your reaction visibly. Patricia McClain is not dead."

Pete stared at him.

"Mary Anne didn't destroy her. She set her down somewhere. Don't ask me where because I don't know. But I preview Patricia's presence in San Rafael within the next few hours. At her apartment."

Pete could think of nothing to say; he continued to stare at the pre-cog.

"See?" Mutreaux said. "No palpable reaction of any sort. Perhaps you're ambivalent." He added, "She'll only be there a short time; then she's going to Titan. And not by Doctor Philipson's Psionic means but in the more conventional manner, by interplan ship."

"She's really on their side, isn't she? There's no doubt of that?"

"Oh yes," Mutreaux said, nodding. "She's really on their side. But that's not going to stop you from going, is it?"

"No," Pete said, and started from the apartment.

"May I come along?" Mutreaux asked.

"Why?"

"To keep her from killing you."

Pete was silent a moment. "It's really like that, is "it?"

Mutreaux nodded. "It certainly is, and you know it. You watched them shoot Hawthorne."

"Okay," Pete said. "Come with me." He added, "Thanks." It was hard to say it.

They left the apartment building together, Pete slightly ahead of David Mutreaux.

As they reached the street, Pete said, "Did you know that Nats Katz, the disc jockey, showed up at the con-apt in Carmel?"

Nodding, Dave Mutreaux said, "Yes. I met him an hour or so ago and talked to him; he looked me up. It was the first time I had ever run into him, although of course I had heard of him." He added, "It's because of him that I crossed over."

"Crossed over?" Halting, Pete turned toward Mutreaux, who followed after him.

And found himself, incredibly, facing a heat-needle.

"With Katz," Mutreaux said calmly. "The pressure simply was too much on me, Pete. I couldn't effectively resist it. Nats is extraordinarily powerful. He was chosen to be leader of the Wa Pei Nan here on Terra for a good reason. Come on, let's continue on our way to Patricia McClain's apartment." He gestured with the heat-needle.

After a moment Pete said, "Why didn't you just let me kill myself? Why intervene at all?"

"Because," Dave Mutreaux said, "you're coming over to our side, Pete. We can make good use of you. The Wa Pei Nan doesn't approve of this Game-playing solution; once we manage to penetrate Pretty Blue Fox by means of you, we can call The Game off from, this end." He added, "We've already discussed it with the moderate faction on Titan and they're determined to play; they like to play and they feel

this controversy between the two cultures ought to be resolved within a legal framework. Needless to say, the Wa Pei Nan does not agree."

They continued along the dark sidewalk, toward the Mc-Clain apartment, Dave Mutreaux slightly behind Pete.

"I should have guessed," Pete said. "When Katz showed up. I had an intuition but I didn't act on it." They had penetrated the group and directly, it seemed, through him. He wished now that he had managed to find the courage to drop his car into the sea; he had been right; it would have been better for everyone concerned. Everyone and everything he believed in.

"When The Game begins," Mutreaux said, "I will be there and you, too, Pete, and we will decline to play. And perhaps by that time Nats will have managed to persuade others. I can't see that far ahead; the alternative courses are obscure to me, for reasons I can't make out." They had almost reached the McGlain apartment, now.

When they opened the door to the apartment they found Pat McClain busy packing two suitcases; she hardly paused to acknowledge their presence.

"I picked up your thoughts as you came down the hall," she said, carrying an armload of clothes to the suitcases from the dresser in the bedroom. Her face, Pete saw, had a craven, caved-in look on it; in every way she had collapsed from the disastrous clash with Mary Anne. She worked feverishly to complete her packing, as if struggling against an inexorable and yet unclearly seen deadline.

"Where are you going?" Pete asked. "Titan?"

"Yes," Patricia answered. "As far away from that girl as I possibly can get. She can't hurt me there; I'll be safe." Her hands, Pete saw, shook as she tried, and failed, to close the suitcases. "Help me," she said, appealing to Mutreaux.

Obligingly, Dave Mutreaux closed the suitcases for her.

"Before you leave," Pete said to her, "let me ask you something. How do the Titanians play The Game being telepaths?"

"Do you think you're going to care?" Patricia said, pausing, lifting her head and regarding him bleakly. "After Katz and Philipson are through with you?"

"I care now," he said. "They've been playing The Game for a long time, so evidently they've found a way to incorporate their faculty or—"

Patricia said, "They hobble it, Pete."

"I see," he said. But he did not see. Hobble it how? And to what extent?

Patricia said, "Through drug-ingestion. The effect is similar to what the phenothiazine class does to a Terran."

"Phenothiazines," Mutreaux said. "In big doses that's given" to schizophrenics; in quantity it becomes an anti-psychotic medication."

"It lessens the schizophrenic delusions," Patricia said, "because it obliterates the involuntary telepathic sense; it eradicates the paranoiac response to the picking up of subconscious hostilities in others. The Titanians possess medication' which acts along the same lines on them and the rules of The Game, as they practice it, require them to lose their talent or at least to abort it by some extent."

Mutreaux, glancing at his watch, said, "He should be here any time now, Patricia. Surely you're going to wait for him."

"Why?" she said, still gathering up articles here and there in the apartment. "I don't want to stay; I just want to get out. Before something else happens. Something more that has to do with her."

"We'll need all three of us to exert sufficient influence on Garden, here," Mutreaux pointed out.

"You get Nats Katz, then," Patricia said. "I'm telling you I'm not going to stay one minute longer than I have to!"

"But right now Katz is in Carmel," Mutreaux said, patiently. "And we want to have Garden thoroughly with us when we go there."

"I can't help," Patricia said, paying no attention to him; she could not seem to stop her headlong flight, her rushing blindly. "Listen, Dave, honest to god, there's only one thing that matters to me; I don't want to undergo again what we went through in Nevada. You were there, you know what I'm talking about. And next time she won't spare you, because now you're with us. I really advise you to get out, too; let E. G. Philipson handle this, since he's immune to

her. But it's your life; you have to decide." She went on, then, and Mutreaux somberly seated himself, with the heat-needle, waiting for Doctor Philipson to show up.

To himself Pete thought, Hobble it. Hobble the Psionic talents on both sides, as Patricia said. It could be an agreement with them; we make use of the phenothiazines, they use whatever it is they're accustomed to. So they were cheating when they read my mind. And then he thought, And they'll cheat again. We can't trust them to hobble themselves. They seem to feel that their moral obligations end when they encounter us.

"That's right," Patricia said, picking up his thoughts. "They're not going to hobble themselves when they play you, Pete. And you can't compel them to because in your own playing you don't recognize such a stipulation; you can't show them a legal basis on your side for demanding that."

"We can show them that we've never allowed Psionic talents at the board," he said.

"But you are now. Your group is voting that daughter of mine in and Dave Mutreaux in, right?" She smiled at him crookedly, heartlessly, her eyes lusterless and black. "So that's that, Pete Garden. Too bad. At least you made the try."

Bluffing, he thought. Telepaths. Hobbling through medication that acts as a thalamic suppresser, dulls the extrasensory area of the brain. It could be dulled to various degrees, damped to some extent but not entirely; gradations can be obtained, depending on the amount of medication. Ten milligrams of a phenothiazine would dampen it; sixty would obliterate it.

And then he thought, his mind careening, Suppose we didn't look at the cards we drew? There would be nothing in our minds for the Titanians to read because we wouldn't know what number we'd obtained...

To Mutreaux, Patricia said, "He's almost managed it, Dave. He forgets that he's not going to be playing on the Terran side, that he's going to belong to us by the time he seats himself at the Game board." She brought out a little overnight bag, now, hurrying to fill it.

Pete thought, If we had Mutreaux, if we could regain him, we could win. Because I know how, finally.

"You know," Patricia said, "but how is it going to help you?"

Aloud, Pete said, "We could dampen his pre-cog faculty to an undetermined degree. So that it becomes unpredictable." Through the use of phenothiazine spansules he realized, which act over a period of hours at a variable rate. Mutreaux himself would not know if he were bluffing or not, how accurate his guess was. He would draw a card, and, without looking at it, move our piece. If his pre-cog faculty were operating at maximum force at that instant his guess would be accurate; it would not be a bluff. But if at that instant the medication had a greater rather than a lesser effect on him—

It would be a bluff. And Mutreaux himself would not know. That could easily be arranged; someone else would prepare the phenothiazine spansule, fix the rate at which it would release its medication.

"But," Patricia said softly, "Dave isn't on your side of the Game-table, Pete."

Pete said, "But I'm right. That's how we could play against the Titanian telepaths and win."

"Yes," Patricia said, and nodded.

"He's worked it out now, has he?" Mutreaux asked her.

"He has," she said. "I feel sorry for you, Pete, because you've got it and it's too late in coming. Your people would have a lot of fun, wouldn't they? Preparing the grains of medication within the spansule, using all kinds of complex tables and formulae to work out the rate of release. It could be random, too, if you wanted it that way, or at a fixed but so elaborate rate that—"

To Mutreaux, Pete said, "How can you sit there and know you're betraying us? You're not a Titanian national; you're a Terran."

Calmly, Mutreaux said, "Psychic dynamisms are real, Pete, as real as any other kind of force. I foresaw my meeting with Nats Katz; I foresaw what was going to happen, but I couldn't prevent it. Remember, I didn't seek him out, he found me."

"Why didn't you warn us?" Pete said. "When you were still on our side of the board."

"You would have killed me," Mutreaux said. "I previewed that particular alternative future. In several, I did tell you. And—" He shrugged. "I don't blame you; what other course would you have? My going over to Titan determines the outcome of The Game. Our acquiring you proves that."

"He wishes," Patricia said, "that you had left the Emphytal in his medicine cabinet; he wishes he had taken them. Poor Pete, always a potential suicide, aren't you? Always, as far as you're concerned, that's the ultimate way out. The one solution to everything."

Mutreaux said restlessly, "Doctor Philipson should have been here by now. Are you certain the arrangements were understood? Could the moderates have sequestered his services? Legally, they hold the—"

"Doctor Philipson would never yield to the cowards in our midst," Patricia said. "You're familiar with his attitude." Her voice was sharp, laden with dread and concern.

"But he's not here," Mutreaux said. "Something's wrong"

They looked at each other, silently.

"What do you preview?" Patricia demanded.

"Nothing," Mutreaux said. His face, now, was pale.

"Why not?"

"If I could preview, I could preview, period," Mutreaux said bitingly, "Isn't that obvious? I don't know and I wish I did." He got to his feet and went over to the window to look out. For a moment he had forgotten Pete; he held the heat-needle slackly, squinting to see in the evening darkness that lay outside. His back was to Pete, and Pete jumped toward him.

"Dave!" Patricia barked, dropping her armload of books.

Mutreaux turned, and a bolt from the heat-needle zoomed past Pete; he felt the peripheral effects from it, the dehydrating envelope that surrounded the laser beam itself, the narrow, effective beam that was so useful both in close quarters and at a distance.

Raising his arms, Pete struck the man with both elbows, in the unprotected throat.

The heat-needle rolled away from both of them across the

floor. Patricia McClain, sobbing, scrambled after it. "Why? Why couldn't you predict this?" She clutched at the small cylinder, frantically.

His face sickly and dark, Mutreaux shut his eyes and dwindled into physical collapse, pawing at himself, inhaling raucously, no longer concerned with anything else beyond the massive, difficult effort to live.

"I'm killing you, Pete," Patricia McClain gasped, backing away from him, holding the heat-needle waveringly pointed at him. Sweat, he saw, stood out on her upper lip; her mouth quivered violently and tears filled her eyes. "I can read your mind," she said huskily, "and I know, Pete, I know what you'll do if I don't. You've got to have Dave Mutreaux back on your side of the board to win and you can't have him back; he's ours."

Throwing himself away from her he tumbled out of the path of the laser, snatching at anything. His fingers closed over a book and he hurled it; the book fluttered open and dropped at Patricia McClain's feet, harmlessly.

Panting, Patricia backed away, still. "Dave will recover," she whispered. "If you had killed him perhaps it wouldn't matter so much, because then you couldn't get him for your side and we wouldn't—"

She broke off. Swiftly turning her head she listened, not breathing.

"The door," she said.

The knob turned.

Patricia raised the heat-needle. Slowly, her arm bent and twisted, inch by inch, until the muzzle of the heat-needle was pointing at her face. She stared down at it, unable to take her eyes from it. She said, "Please don't, okay? I gave birth to you. Please—"

Her fingers, against her will, moved the stud. The laser beam flicked on.

Pete looked away.

When he looked back at last the door of the apartment stood open. Mary Anne, framed in the outline of darkness, walked in, slowly, hands deep in the pockets of her long coat. Her face was expressionless. She said to Pete, "Dave Mutreaux is alive, isn't he?"

"Yes." He did not look at the heap which had been Patricia McClain; he averted his eyes from it and said, "We need him so leave him alone, Mary." His heart labored slowly, horribly.

"I realize that," Mary Anne said.

"How did you know about—this?"

Mary Anne said, after an interval, "When I got to the condominium apartment in Carmel, with Joe Schilling I saw Nats and of course I understood. I knew that Nats was the organization's overall superior. He outranked even Rothman."

"What did you do there?" Pete said.

Joe Schilling, his face puffy with tension, entered the apartment and went up to Mary Anne; he put his hand on her shoulder but she jerked away, going alone over to the corner to stand and watch. "When she came in," Schilling said. "Katz was fixing himself a drink. She—" He hesitated.

Mary Anne said tonelessly, "I moved the glass which he held. I made it go five inches, that's all. He was—holding it at chest level."

"The glass is inside him," Schilling said. "It very simply cut his heart, or part of his heart, out of his circulatory system. There was a good deal of blood, because the glass didn't go in all the way." He was silent then; neither he nor Mary Anne spoke.

On the floor, Dave Mutreaux, gargling, struggled, his face blue, trying to get air into his lungs. He had stopped stroking his throat now, and his eyes were open. But he did not seem able to see.

"What about him?" Schilling said.

Pete said, "With Patricia dead and Nats Katz dead, and Philipson—" He understood, now, why Doctor Philipson had failed to appear. "He knew you would be here," he said to Mary Anne. "So he was afraid to leave Titan. Philipson saved himself, at their expense."

"I guess so," Mary Anne murmured.

Joe Schilling said, "I can hardly blame him."

Bending down, Pete said to Mutreaux, "Will you be all right?"

Mutely, Dave Mutreaux nodded.

Pete said to him, "You must show up at the Game-board.

On our side. You know why; you know what I intend to do."

Staring at him, Mutreaux nodded.

"I can manage him," Mary Anne said, walking over to watch. "He's too much afraid of me to do anything more for them. Aren't you?" she said to Mutreaux in the same inert, neutral tone. And prodded him with her toe.

Mutreaux, dully, managed to nod.

"Be glad you're alive," Schilling said to him.

"He is," Mary Anne said. To Pete she said, "Will you do something about my mother, please?"

"Sure," Pete said. He glanced at Joe Schilling. "Why don't you go downstairs and wait in the car?" he said to Mary Anne. "We'll call E. B. Black; we don't need you for a while."

"Thank you," Mary Anne said. Turning, she walked slowly out of the apartment; Pete and Joe Schilling watched her until she was gone.

"Because of her," Joe Schilling said, "we're going to win, there at the board."

Pete nodded. Because of her and because Mutreaux was still alive. Alive—and no longer in a position to act for the Titanian authority.

"We're lucky," Joe Schilling said. "Someone had left the door of the con-apt open; she saw Katz before he could see her. She was standing outside and he couldn't make her out until too late. I think he had counted on Mutreaux' pre-cog faculty, forgetting or not understanding that she's a variable as far as that faculty is concerned. He was as unprotected by Mutreaux' talent as if Mutreaux had never existed."

And so are we, Pete thought to himself. That unprotected.

But he could not bother to worry about that now. The Game against the Titanians lay directly ahead; he did not need to be a pre-cog to see that. Everything else would have to wait.

Joe Schilling said, "I have confidence in her. I'm not concerned about what she might do, Pete."

"Let's hope you're right," Pete said. He bent down beside

the body of Patricia McClain. This was Mary's mother, he realized. And Mary Anne did this to her. And yet we have to depend on Mary Anne; Joe is right. We have no choice.