Burke gulped and grinned, nodded. "To coin a phrase, you said it, kiddo." He smiled at Joe. "I'll run her right down to the Center and get her registered, and take out an intent option. I guess we can't fight fate, Joe, can we?" Joe took a deep breath of air. "I guess not. I guess it's--kismet." He was still standing there when he heard the front door slam. He kept staring at the machine, not seeing it, hearing instead all she had said. She knew him better than anyone who lived. Better, actually, than he knew himself, because she didn't rationalize, being outside his mental sphere now. You might say she'd been in his mind and detested what she had found there. It was a crawling feeling, the knowledge that he had been guilty of rationalization himself, that he had faults his mind refused to acknowledge. He couldn't doubt that he was all the cold and gruesome things she had called him. The worst shock, however, was that he had studied psychology and honestly had believed he was an objective thinker. But who, he realized, could be completely honest about himself? * * * * * He looked at the machine and saw the non-rationalization electrodes. He had used that on her and she had seen clearly what he still couldn't recognize. What he needed, apparently, was a good, objective look at his own mind. He set the contact clock for objectivity maximum and clamped the electrodes on his head. He reached for the switch, had to close his eyes before he could throw it. He didn't see the second hand going around and around the clock, but he felt the prejudice-erasing impulses, the objective-appraisal stimuli, revealing memories that had shaped him, humiliations that had twisted him and been forgotten, urgings and longings and guilts that he had never known existed. He saw himself. It was highly unpleasant. There was a final buzz and the clock stopped. Joe opened his eyes, both figuratively and literally. He unclamped the helmet with the electrodes and stepped from the chair, holding onto the arm, looking at the mirrored inside walls of the mold. He had made an image of himself and it had turned on him. Now he had made--what? An image of his image's image of him? It was very confusing, yet somehow clear. He went slowly up the stairs, smelling the perfume. It wasn't Alice's and that was peculiar, because she had practically swabbed herself with the stuff, knowing he liked it, and she had just left. It was Vera's perfume. He remembered her waiting at the station, making her ridiculous bids at the card table, gossiping witlessly with Mrs. Harvey, hitting her thumb when she tried to hang his pictures in the study. Vera.... He prowled dissatisfiedly through the house, as though in search of something, and then went out to the car. He took the super-pike almost all the way to the Center. There were bright cards on posts every few hundred feet: