With Thorn gone, his rebuff in the Sky Room loomed as a black and paralyzingly insurmountable obstacle that grew momently higher. They were lucky, he told himself, not to have had their present research funds curtailed--let alone having them increased, or being given a large staff of assistants, or being granted access to the closely guarded files of confidential information on cryptic amnesiacs and other citizens. Any earlier culture would probably have forbidden their research entirely, as a menace to the mental stability of the public. Only an almost fetishlike reverence for individual liberty and the inviolability of personal pursuits, had saved them. The Committee's adverse decision had even shaken his own beliefs. He felt himself a puny little man, beset by uncertainties and doubts, quite incompetent to protect the world from dangers as shadowy, vast, and inscrutable as the gloom-drenched woodlands a mile below. Why the devil had Thorn left the meeting like that, of necessity creating a bad impression? Surely he couldn't have given way to any luring hypnotic impulse--he of all men ought to know the danger of that. Still, there had been that unpleasant suggestion of sleepwalking in his departure--an impression that Clawly's memory kept magnifying. And Thorn was a strange fellow. After all these years, Clawly still found him unpredictable. Thorn had a spiritual recklessness, an urge to plumb all mental deeps. And God knows there were deeps enough for plumbing these days, if one were foolish. Clawly felt them in himself--the faint touch of a darker, less pleasant version of his own personality, against which he must keep constantly on guard. If he had let something happen to Thorn--! A variation in the terrestrial magnetic field, not responded to soon enough, sent him spinning sideways a dozen yards, forced his attention back on his trip. He wondered if he had managed to slip away as unobtrusively as he had thought. A few of the committee members had wanted to talk. Firemoor, who had voted against the others and supported Clawly's views rather too excitedly, had been particularly insistent. But he had managed to put them off. Still, what if he were followed? Surely Conjerly's reference to "fortunetellers" had been mere chance, although it had given him a nasty turn. But if Conjerly and Tempelmar should find out where he was going now--What a handle that would give them against him! It would be wiser to drop the whole business, at least for a time. No use. The vice of the thing--if vice it be--was in his blood. The Blue Lorraine drew him as a magnet flicks up a grain of iron. * * * * *