"_I didn't steal it!_" Saxon thought indignantly. "_I worked with Villainowski building the ship. It would have been impossible for me not to learn it._" "_Exactly_," came the reply. "_And your continued existence hinges entirely on your silence._" A chill wind blew up Saxon's spine, but it only fanned the flame of eagerness which had sprung up in him. Here were others like himself, possessed of telepathic powers. "_Who are you?_" he thought passionately. He realized in dismay that the prickling in skin and scalp had diminished. The telepaths were withdrawing, deserting him without a hint of further contact. "_Who are you? How can I find you?_" Nothing! He and the girl were alone again in the moonlit doorway. A strange sense of exhilaration replaced Saxon's first feeling of letdown. There were other telepaths on Earth and sometime, someplace their paths would cross again. He stepped into the street, saying to Ileth, "Let's go. I was mistaken. There's no one here." In the rays of the street lamp, he looked more like a pugilist than a Government Bureau of Research man and one of Terra's top nuclear physicists. He had a big nose, twice broken, strong white teeth and a square massive jaw. He caught the girl's thought and grinned down at her. "_He's not handsome_," she was thinking, "_not by any standard, but when he grins like that you don't think about his looks and virility radiates from him like heat waves. He's a dangerous man! Emil underrates him!_" "Hadn't we better take the conveyor?" she asked aloud. * * * * * Jon Saxon nodded, swung the girl lightly by her elbows to the pick-up, transferred to commuter, then express. They found seats while the buildings flowed past on either hand like a speeded-up movie. "You have a frightening job," said Ileth, looking up at his from big hazel-green eyes. Her shiny black hair she wore in a shoulder length page-boy bob. She smoothed her short-waisted chartreuse jacket over small firm breasts. "I'm surprised Government lets you go out without your bodyguard." "They don't." Saxon's unprepossessing features lit with a boyish grin. "But I slip away from them once in a while." "You were afraid of an ambush back there in the street?" He nodded. "Yes. I thought one of the corporations may have got wind of my escapade." The girl, he saw from her thoughts, was satisfied with his explanation. In these days of savage competition, the big corporations maintained their own factories and laboratories. General Atomic, Tri-World, Amalgamated Plastic, a score of lesser companies employed staffs of technicians and research scientists. The lives of these men were fraught with a peculiar danger. They were subject to bribery, kidnapping and torture by the spy agencies of rival companies in their efforts to extort from them any new discovery or guarded scientific process their corporations might possess. Independent agencies manned by corrupt technicians had men everywhere.