Wearily, I shook my head. "Save your breath, Controller. The only deal I'll make is not to kill you, providing you stop those executions. Beyond that, you'll have to take your chances with the courts." Silence again. And still Kruze sat granite-solid in his chair. Only his eyes showed that he'd heard me--the emotionless, unblinking eyes that never left mine for an instant. Between us, the desk-top gleamed dully, bleak and bare as a sheet of the wind-polished black lake ice you see sometimes in the wintry hinterlands of Bejak II. I tightened my grip on the paragun's butt. "The order, Kruze. Write it down, ready for plating, or I shoot." A thick-shouldered shrug. "Very well, Traynor. If that's the way you want it...." Kruze leaned forward. The next instant, there was the faintest of humming, whirring sounds, apparently issuing from the desk. Simultaneously, involuntarily, my right arm jerked forward and down. The gun tore from my fingers and slapped against the desk-top's polished surface with a noisy _crack!_ as if impelled by unseen springs. For the fraction of a second I lurched off balance--incredulous, gaping. Before I could recover, Kruze whipped a gun of his own from the desk's sorter-slot. His voice rang with harsh triumph: "As you said earlier, Friend Traynor--don't move, if you want to live!" The light in his eyes said even more. I stood ever so still. Heaving up from his chair, he came around the desk, pocketing my own paragun in the process. "You're an ingenious man, Traynor. So I know you'll appreciate ingenuity in another. You see, a buzzer can be under a desk just as well as on top of it. And sometimes, instead of buzzing, it turns on a magnetic field strong enough to jerk an anvil clear across the room. I've found it quite effective in discouraging would-be assassins. It's so unanticipated--like this--" The controller had come abreast of me as he spoke. Now, without warning, he suddenly hammered a sledge-like fist straight to the pit of my stomach. Retching, I lurched back; bent double. Savagely, Kruze brought up a rock-hard knee, square into my face. Jagged pain-colors exploded in my brain. I crashed to the floor, the room swirling around me. Kruze again; words coming from afar: "No noise, now, Traynor! As you warned me, we mustn't attract the attention of my guards. We'll just leave the way you came--down the shaft-lift, into the space-warp, and then away on a little trip." * * * * * Groggily, prodded on by kicks, I lurched to my feet ... stumbled back to the alcove and the shaft-lift. My nose was bleeding badly. My belly screamed protest at every step. Down, now; all the way down, with Kruze and his gun crowded close against me. Then a death-march that ran the length of the corridor from the lift to the space-warp chamber.