The corporations protected themselves by confining their technicians to barracks and never permitting them to wander forth unescorted. It was a condition which Jon Saxon found little better than slavery. The constant surveillance irked him to the point of rebellion. Now he was confronted suddenly with the fact that he had been under observation of an infinitely more subtle kind as well. Some group was keeping constant watch upon his mind. But who? Ileth sighed and laid her sleek black head on his shoulder. "Jon, you've been so quiet tonight. Is it because tomorrow the expedition leaves for Alpha Centauri?" "I don't know. I'm not afraid, exactly. We know the drive is practicable, but it's the first attempt man's ever made to reach the stars. We've never been beyond the Solar System before, Ileth." He felt the girl's arms slip around his neck, cling with surprising strength. "I'm afraid, Jon. I wish you weren't going." "What are you afraid of?" Ileth bit her lower lip. She was feeling rather than thinking, Saxon realized, a mental chaos bubbling in the primitive thalamic regions of her nervous system, a formless intuition of disaster stalking the first expedition into stellar space. "I--I don't know exactly," she confessed. "I don't understand it, Jon." Saxon's eyes narrowed. He had intercepted that dread of the expedition's fate before. He had felt it emanating from hundreds of individuals otherwise unrelated. It was like a hypnotically imposed command: "_Don't venture into the Stellar Depths!_" And it always stemmed from the subconscious, the regions of the human mind telepathically closed to him. At first he'd been inclined to think it was dread of the unknown. But now he was not so sure. Facts, Saxon knew, were assimilated by the subconscious, later to emerge as hunches and intuition. He had grown to believe that there must be reason behind this universal fear of stellar space. He had even felt it in himself; in his chief, Villainowski; in his co-workers at Government's Bureau of Research. It was a very real feeling that nothing but disaster for the human race could come of this venture to the stars. II Ileth's apartment was on the ninety-eighth level, flush against the transparent plastic dome which hermetically sealed in Adirondaka. Jon Saxon followed the girl out of the lift, watching her with admiration. She was a slim, long legged creature in chartreuse green, jodhpur-like trousers that moulded her slender waist and rounded hips with amazing fidelity before flaring at her thighs. Ileth Urban was as fetching a bit of scientist-bait as General Atomic could have desired. All the corporations used these girls. They scoured the Solar System for the cleverest, most beautiful ones to be found. They paid them fantastic wages and trained them to worm secrets from susceptible males. Scientific Mata Hari's.