At the same time, he worried over his own problem. Who was betraying non-criminal Controllers to the PD Police? In that six-week period, two more men and a woman were arrested--one in Spain, one in India, and one in Hawaii. There weren't very many Controllers on Earth, percentagewise. Of the three and a half billion people on Earth, less than an estimated one-thousandth of one percent were telepathic. But that made a grand total of some thirty-five thousand people. Spread, as they were, all over the planet, it was rare that one Controller ever met another. The intelligent ones didn't use their power; they remained concealed, even from each other. But _someone_, somewhere, was finding them and betraying them to the Psychodeviant Police. As more and more data came in on the Lasser case, Houston began to get an idea. If there were a really clever, highly intelligent, megalomaniac Controller, wouldn't it be part of his psychological pattern to attempt to get rid of the majority of Controllers, those who simply wanted to lead normal lives? And, if so, wasn't it possible that both his cases--the official and the unofficial--might lead to the same place: Lasser & Sons? It began to look as though Houston could kill both his birds at once, if he could just figure out when, how, and in what direction to throw the stone. In the middle of the seventh week, a Controller in Manchester, England, was mobbed and torn to bits by an irate crowd before the PD Police could get to him. There was no doubt in Houston's mind that this one was a real megalomaniac; he had taken over another man's brain and forced him to commit suicide. The controlled man had taken a Webley automatic, put it to his temple, and blown his brains out. The Controller's mistake was in not realizing what the sudden shock of that bullet, transmitted to him telepathically, could do to his own mind. In the mental disorder that followed, he was spotted and killed easily. * * * * * There was still no word from Dorrine. She had flown back to the States a week after Houston had returned, but she had had to get back to England after three days. Since then, he had had three letters, nothing more. And letters are a damned unsatisfactory way for a telepath to conduct a love affair. The one other factor that entered in was The Group, the small band of sane, reasonable telepaths who had begun to build themselves into an organization--a sort of Mutual Protective Association. Personally, Houston didn't think much of the idea; the Group didn't have any real organization, and they refused to put one together. It was supposed to be democratic, but it sometimes bordered on the anarchic.