He sat down. A picture rose involuntarily in his mind: The face was that of Doumya Filone. He couldn't prove it, but it seemed certain that she was the one. She knew about the circuit, of course, had known long before he did. He remembered the incident when his skin had itched. He had called her about it and she hadn't seemed surprised. She had left the screen for some time--for what purpose? To adjust the mechanism, or have someone else adjust it. The last, probably; the mechanism was almost certainly at the police end, and at the time he called she had been at home. In any event, the mechanism had originally been set too strong and she had ordered the setting to be reduced. That suggested one thing: the power to activate the circuit came from the mechanism--a radarlike device. Then what? His skin had momentarily become translucent, allowing him to see the circuit. How she achieved that, he didn't know, but the reason was obvious. It had been her way of warning him and it had worked. The message in his hand told him one thing. He had known about the danger, but he hadn't guessed that he didn't have to face it alone. Something else was evident: her control was limited--perhaps she could step in at a critical moment, but the greater part was up to him. He moved quickly. He opened the delivery chute and put in the small bag that held his clothing, then punched a code that dispatched it to the transportation terminal. In return, he received a small plastic strip with the same code on it. The bag could be traced, but not without trouble, and he should be able to pick it up before then. At this stage he didn't want to be encumbered. He took a last look around and stepped into the hall. He leaped back again. A heavy caliber slug crashed into the door. * * * * * That had been meant to kill. He was lucky it hadn't. Who was it? Not the police. By law they were restricted to tangle guns, though they sometimes forgot. In this case, their memory should be good--they'd have difficulty explaining away the holes in his body. Not that they'd have to, really; if they wanted, they could toss him into an alley and claim they had found his body later. Still, there was no particular reason why they should want to kill him outright when they could do it by degrees scientifically and with full legal protection. They didn't call it killing. There was another term: converting.