"In ten days, your men turned up 736 duplicates of Zubin's gadget. The story on all of them was the same: A good-looking girl had vocoed, congratulated whoever it was on having a birthday or anniversary or promotion, and then sent up a thrill-mill. "Beyond that, you didn't get far. It turned out there wasn't any Apex syndicate or cartel or work coadunate listed anywhere. No one had ever heard of any such device as a perceptual intensifier. The messengers who delivered the packages worked from voco calls themselves; they even made their pick-ups at robot sorter stations. And when you tried to track down the girl who'd done the calling, you found her face apparently belonged to a youngster named Celeste Stelpa who's been certified as dead ever since the Kel blasted Bejak II four years ago. "As for the technical end of things, nine of your lab men lost their conditioning before they could even get a thrill-mill apart. When they finally did tear one down successfully, they found it wasn't anything too remarkable, really--just a routine sort of gadget that regrouped standard circuits and miniquipment to produce interpulsational patterns of alpha and zeta waves. Effect-wise, that erases the synaptical threadings set up by Educational Psych's conditioning process, so that experiences come through sharp and clear, at maximum voltage, instead of dulled and blurred. It's a permanent change, too--though whether that's accidental or by design, we still don't know. "Alpha-zeta erasure isn't anything new. It's been done in the psych labs for a hundred years or more. "And that's where the only really interesting angle on all this comes in: In the labs, the job took a roomful of equipment. So to get the process down to thrill-mill size, whoever manufactured these Apex gadgets used special thronium condenser strata and variocouplers. "That automatically pushes the cost per thrill-mill up to twice or three times what you'd ordinarily pay for a grav-car." I got up, then, taking my time about it ... letting the silence grow heavy while I came around the pond-sized desk and moved to a spot directly in front of Gaylord. "Controller," I said softly, "who do you know who can afford to give away 737 thrill-mills at that kind of price?" A shrugging, a shifting, more hostile than uneasy. "No one, I guess. At least, no one I've ever heard of." He still sounded sullen. "That's right," I agreed. "No one. It would dent FedGov Security's confidential budget to bury an expense that big. Kruze himself couldn't handle it; not without a lot of doing." Again, Gaylord shifted. But this time, nervous tension rather than belligerence was in the action. As earlier, perplexity furrowed his forehead. I said, "Now you know why I'm not going to waste time scanning file-reels, Controller. The data we need's already in. Intelligent interpretation is the next step.--That, and"--I paused, ever so briefly--"working up the nerve to act." * * * * *