"You understand our position, Lincoln. If we prevented you from trying, well, you might have succeeded, and we'd never know the benefits of your success. It was your idea, and you wanted to try. But don't feel too broken. Others have tried." "Small consolation. Knowing that another man is starving will not put food in my _belly_." Lincoln stood up, dusted off his jacket, and left the office. The report of a pistol echoed and re-echoed up and down the corridor, reverberating and hushing until it could be mistaken for a wild cackle of laughter. * * * * * Wanniston went into the small office beside his own, through an interconnecting door. The key to the outer door hung in the lock by the tongue, and the office was a sharp contrast to his spotless business office. Here was no clean desk, no bookcase bulging with erudition, no deep-pile carpet. Instead, the place was a litter of complicated equipment. Not messy, in the dirty sense of the word, but the standard neglect of any laboratory. Delicate instruments stood on the floor, a box was partly filled with discarded parts, and several pieces of partly disassembled apparatus lined the walls. On the desk, which was the cleanest spot in the room, there stood a small cabinet. It was not the precisely finished cabinet that comes with commercial equipment, but strictly functional. There was no pattern to the dials--at least there had been no attempt to arrange the controls in sensible pattern. They stuck out wherever they were needed--and the sides and top each had a knob or two. Wanniston slid the headpiece over his temples and snapped the main switch. A split-second timer kicked in for less than one-tenth of a second, waited for ten seconds, and then repeated the dose. Four times it followed the sequence of keying the machine for a period of less than a tenth of a second, following with a ten-second pause. Finally it gave Wanniston a full one-second charge and then ceased. The financier removed the temple set and sat thinking for a moment. There was a bit of resentment at the machine--not resentment, exactly, but a slight feeling of annoyance that he must take such microscopic doses of the machine. He knew the story of Andrew Tremaine and how the publisher's attempts to use the machine had resulted in self-destruction because it had been too good. But, smiled Wanniston, he really had no intention of trying to lift the whole race to the level of the Ambassador of the Galactic Ones, the emissary Gerd Lel Rayne. Rayne had told him. Not the complete story, of course. Rayne could never tell that. Nor if he did, Wanniston could not have understood it. But he did know that Tremaine had developed such a machine and had energized his mind with disastrous results.