"_It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough!_" A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices--yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli--then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me--and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought--and the world-ending impact as I fell. At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again--fighting the invader. "_Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one!_" "_Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force!_" Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering--at a conscious level. Watching the Gool mind, I learned. The insinuating probe--a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized--was no more than a pattern in emptiness.... But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me. Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves. Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void--and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape. There was a soundless shriek. "_Effulgence! It reached out--touched me!_" * * * * * Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia--a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well. I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....