But Margaret did not abandon him. Each day she visited him and sat near him, often touching him. Her hypocritical, saccharine attentiveness was so revolting that at times it was all he could do to maintain his dazed, semi-idiotic pose. She spent the hours planting suggestions in his supposedly vacant mind--about trusting her implicitly, about obeying no one else, about preparing to exact a blood revenge from Victor. Sasso and the Faith she did not mention. At intervals she brought him more pills. After a terrifying experience in which she remained with him so long that a small portion of the drug dissolved in his mouth and left him unable to think for hours afterward he adopted the expedient of tucking a small strip of cloth beneath his tongue to absorb his saliva and keep the pills from melting before he could spit them out. Just one would seal his doom--and that of Varda. He was glad now of the long hours he had spent reading Krasna's scrolls. One had been a medical treatise and the mental control he had acquired in the Thin World enabled him to dilate the pupil of his single eye, slow his pulse, and counterfeit the drug symptoms exactly. On the sixth day Wor visited him, alone. "Stand up!" he commanded. He spoke a queerly accented English, evidently learned from Margaret. Eldon obeyed. "Turn around.... Bend over.... Walk to the door.... Now come back." Eldon obeyed the warrior, although Margaret thought she had conditioned him to take orders from no one but herself. The time for a showdown was not yet ripe. "Turn on the lights," Wor directed crisply. Eldon hesitated. "Turn them on!" Wor bellowed. Eldon looked blank. It had been a trap, for the lights were mentally controlled. Wor tried another trick. "Catch!" He pulled a blast rod from its holster and tossed it. Eldon caught it, but clumsily. "Fire it out the window." The weapon differed from the blast rods of the Forest People. This one had a button, evidently a trigger, while Krasna's had been entirely controlled by thought. Eldon was sorely tempted. It would be so easy to whirl and burn Wor down. But he resisted the impulse, knowing he would have only one chance and must make it really count. And perhaps the weapon was not charged. Wor was not altogether a fool. He pretended stupid unfamiliarity with the device. Wor appeared satisfied that Margaret had not been arranging some scheme of her own. "We will teach you to use this weapon later," he said. "You will use it to kill Victor." That gave Eldon his first ray of hope, a foundation upon which to build a plan. Wor's eyes narrowed with jealousy as he spoke the Earthman's name, and Eldon had overheard enough to understand why. Since Victor Schenley's arrival the officer had found himself with a formidable rival for Sin's confidences and attentions. A smaller, physically weaker rival, but sly, and one who could not be removed by force without incurring Highness Sin's wrath. * * * * *