For the financier trusted no man, and though Da Vincelleo had thought his double-crossing project was a secret, he could not hide it from the richest and most inquisitive human in the system. Nor had he guessed that Revanche would then employ Bioid's competitor to fashion an electronic proxy of himself. Revanche had suffered--long distance--as his plastiskin counterpart had seemed to suffer. Its terror-stricken face was his, and when it had yelled with frustration and screamed for mercy, he had done so also. But when he saw the terrible parody of himself lop off his proxy's head with a saber, he had felt as if he'd been killed and then come to life again. He'd been seized with a laughter that forced him to grip his chair to keep from falling to the floor. And now, very much calmed and smoking a new cigar, he felt wonderful about his mockup's death. He no longer had a barely suppressed fear of being hurled by his deity into the molten ocean of Rejectus. It was as if he had paid for his own sins through the mechanical scapegoat and now could live on with an untroubled conscience. He took the cigar from his mouth and chortled. And a third mushroom suddenly sprouted. Revanche and his star yacht went back to the elements in its white heart, far hotter than the flames of Rejectus. Da Vincelleo had been a thorough man, as suspicious as Revanche himself. Shortly after he had made his deal with the financier, he had had a machine built which keyed in to the personal pattern of his _kappa_ brain-waves. If that pattern disappeared, quit radiating, a circuit was activated which sent a "bloodhound" missile soaring up into the air from a buried pit in the city of Messina, a missile whose electromagnetic nose sniffed for the scent of Revanche's _kappa_ brain-waves and would not stop until it homed in on its target. Thus, if the financier had paused long enough to light up his cigar _before_ pressing the button that disposed of his enemy, he would have finished smoking it and many more after it. For Da Vincelleo had been convinced that Revanche had perished with the false city of Dafess, and he was just reaching out to flick the bloodhound's de-activation stud when Revanche's missile interrupted him forever.