The UN chose St. Louis for its new headquarters--many of its offices had been moved there after the second and most destructive bombing of New York--and when the city by the Mississippi began growing into a real World Capital, the flow of money into it almost squared overnight. Benson began to take an active part in politics in the new World Sovereignty party. He did not, however, allow his political activities to distract him from the work of expanding the company to which he owed his wealth and position. There were always things to worry about. "I don't know," Myers said to him, one evening, as they sat over a bottle of rye in the psychologist's apartment. "I could make almost as much money practicing as a psychiatrist, these days. The whole world seems to be going pure, unadulterated nuts! That affair in Munich, for instance." "Yes." Benson grimaced as he thought of the affair in Munich--a Wagnerian concert which had terminated in an insane orgy of mass suicide. "Just a week after we started our free-sample campaign in South Germany, too...." He stopped short, downing his drink and coughing over it. "Bill! You remember those sheets of onion-skin in that envelope?" "The foundation of our fortunes; I wonder where you really did get that.... Fred!" His eyes widened in horror. "That caution about 'heightened psycho-physiological effects,' that we were never able to understand!" Benson nodded grimly. "And think of all the crazy cases of mass-hysteria--that baseball-game riot in Baltimore; the time everybody started tearing off each others' clothes in Milwaukee; the sex-orgy in New Orleans. And the sharp uptrend in individual psycho-neurotic and psychotic behavior. All in connection with music, too, and all after Evri-Flave got on the market." "We'll have to stop it; pull Evri-Flave off the market," Myers said. "We can't be responsible for letting this go on." "We can't stop, either. There's at least a two months' supply out in the hands of jobbers and distributors over whom we have no control. And we have all these contractual obligations, to buy the entire output of the companies that make the syrup for us; if we stop buying, they can sell it in competition with us, as long as they don't infringe our trade-name. And we can't prevent pirating. You know how easily we were able to duplicate that sample I brought back from Turkey. Why, our legal department's kept busy all the time prosecuting unlicensed manufacturers as it is." "We've got to do something, Fred!" There was almost a whiff of hysteria in Myers' voice. "We will. We'll start, first thing tomorrow, on a series of tests--just you and I, like the old times at Eisenhower High. First, we want to be sure that Evri-Flave really is responsible. It'd be a hell of a thing if we started a public panic against our own product for nothing. And then...." * * * * *