_Nothing personal, you understand. It’s just that I’d like to show off a little. I don’t need to hide anything from you—as a matter of plain, simple fact, I can’t. Not with my shield down._ He paused then, and, in his imagination, he could almost hear Lou’s voice. “I’m listening, Kenneth,” the voice said. “Go on.” _Well, then_, he thought. He fished around in his mind for a second, wondering exactly where to start. Then he decided, in the best traditions of the detective story, not to mention _Alice in Wonderland_, to start at the beginning. _The dear old Psychical Research Society_, he thought, _had been going along for a good many years now—since the 1880’s, as a matter of fact, or somewhere near there. That’s a long time and a lot of research. A lot of famous and intelligent men and women have belonged to the Society. And in all that time, they’ve worked hard, and worked sincerely, in testing every kind of psychic phenomenon. They’ve worked impartially and scientifically to find out whether a given unusual incident was explicable in terms of known natural laws, or was the result of some unknown force._ _And it’s hardly surprising that, after about a hundred years of work, something finally came of it._ “Not surprising at all,” he imagined Lou’s voice saying. “You’re making things very clear, Kenneth.” Or had that been “Sir Kenneth”? Malone wasn’t sure, but it didn’t really matter. He spun the car around a curve in the highway, smiled gently to himself, and went on. _Naturally, to the average man in the street, the Society was just a bunch of crackpots, and the more respected and famous the people who belonged to it, the happier he was; it just proved his superiority to them. He didn’t deal with crackpot notions, did he?_ _No, the Society did. And nobody except the members paid much attention to what was going on._ _I remember one of the book facsimiles you gave me, for instance. Some man, whose name I can’t recall, wrote a great “exposé” of the Society, in which he tried to prove that Sir Lewis Carter and certain other members were trying to take over the world and run it to suit themselves, making a sort of horrible dictatorship out of their power and position. At that, he wasn’t really far from the truth, though he had it turned around a little. But the book shows that he has no knowledge whatever of what psionics is, or how it works. He seems to me to be just a little afraid of it, which probably adds to his ignorance. And, as a result, he got a twisted idea of what the PRS is actually doing._ He could almost hear Lou’s voice again. “Yes,” she was saying. “I remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its humorous aspects.” _That’s right_, Malone thought. _It would be only funny to you. But it would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply because they wouldn’t understand what the Society was all about._ “All right,” Lou’s voice said helpfully. “And what _is_ it all about?”