She was impressed, insisted on knowing his name and where he could be reached. He gave her the information with seeming reluctance. She assured him she could make her way back to the palace alone. "You shall be rewarded, nevertheless," were the last words Ketrik heard as she drove the car away. And he smiled inwardly. * * * * * He was jubilant, retracing his route through the dark streets. Dar Vaajo would certainly send for him tomorrow! For he knew that Praana would tell her father of this. It was just past the midnight hour, and suddenly he remembered something. This was the hour ... but even as the thought crossed his mind, the phenomenon came. It came as a greenish glow rising above the city center, spreading swiftly outward. As it spread, like a blanket of palely pulsing light, a frightening _malignancy_ came with it. Then it touched upon Ketrik, and he reeled. The cold light was all about him, surging through him. Tightening tendrils of it clutched at his brain. A vast singing was in his ears. He fought back, fought as his mind reeled upon a chaos of vertiginous horror! Those light-tendrils tearing at his brain, eagerly, hungrily--here was Dar Vaajo's weapon and he knew it, even as he fell to the street to lie exhausted, his mind going away.... Still he tried to fight, knowing it was hopeless. An agony was in him, tearing at his fingertips and through every muscle; wrenching at his brain, seeking to tear it apart fiber by fiber. He felt his sanity going; it was being _drained_ away as liquid is sucked through a straw. He laughed once, wildly. He felt other light-tendrils seeking, seeking hungrily all about him. With a last vestige of mental power he remembered again a gibbering madman in a dark tunnel.... Then the light was going away. It receded, rushing back upon itself, coalescing into a mass of greenish radiance that swirled and twisted angrily and tried to escape. Almost _alive_! As Jal Thurlo had said! Ketrik rose and stood swaying, his head throbbing, as he watched it from afar. Now the spherical mass of it, deeper in hue and pulsing angrily, hovered in the sky just above Vaajo's laboratories. Suddenly the sphere extended, became a pillar of pulsing light trying to leap away. And it leaped away. Faster than light, swift as thought, hurtling through the outer reaches of space. Ketrik didn't stay to see more. He didn't need to. Even through the cold needle-fires in his brain, he had enough faculty left to know that far out in space, in that part of the heavens, swam the planet Earth. Again this night Dar Vaajo was testing ... testing the power of his curiously-alive weapon.... Ketrik reached the shop of Jal Thurlo, found the jar of _vanadol_ and downed enough of it to put him into merciful oblivion. VI It was late the following day when a car, bearing the royal insignia, drew up before the shop and one of the Guards asked for "Khosan."