At first, it looked as though Lasser would go the way of Sager and Pederson, ending up as a hopelessly insane catatonic. Like his cohorts before him, Lasser retreated under the full pressure of the thought-probes of the five, building stronger and stronger walls. But, quite suddenly, all his defenses crumbled. The mental barriers went down, shattered and dissolving. Lasser's whole mind lay bare. Instead of fighting and hating, Lasser was begging, pleading for help. Lasser was not basically insane. His mind was twisted and warped, but beneath the outer shell was a personality that had enough internal strength to be able to admit that it was wrong and ask for help instead of retreating into oblivion. "This one--I think we can do something with," Matsukuo's thought whispered. * * * * * Eight bodies, uncomfortable and pain-wracked, floated in space, chained to tiny asteroids that drifted slowly in their orbits under the constant pull of the sun. Two of them contained minds that were locked irrevocably within prisons of their own building, sealed off forever from external stimuli, but their suffering was the greater for all that. The other six, chained though their limbs might be, had minds that were free--free, even, of any but the most necessary of internal limitations. Eight bodies, chained to eight lumps of pitted rock, spun endlessly in endless space. And then the ship came. The flare of its atomic rocket could be seen for over an hour before it reached the Penal Cluster. The six eyed it speculatively. Although only two of them were facing the proper direction to see it with their physical eyes, the impressions of those two were easily transmitted to the other four. "Another load of captives," whispered Juan Pedro de Cadiz. "How many this time, I wonder?" "How long have we been here?" asked Houston, not expecting any answer. "Who knows?" It was Lasser. "What we need out here is a clock to tell us when we'll die." "Our oxygen tanks are our clocks," said Sonali. "And they'll notify us when the time comes." "I do believe you morbid-minded people are developing a sense of humor," said Matsukuo, "but I'm not sure I care for the style too much." The flare of the rocket grew brighter as the decelerating ship approached the small cluster of rocks. At last the ship itself took form, shining in the eternal blaze of the sun. When the whiteness of the rocket blaze died suddenly, the ship was only a few dozen yards from Houston's own asteroid. And then a mental voice came into the minds of the six prisoners. "How do you feel, Controllers?" Only Houston recognized that thought-pattern, but his recognition was transmitted instantly to the others. "_Reinhardt!_" Hermann Reinhardt, Division Chief of the Psychodeviant Police, the one man most hated and feared by Controllers, was himself a telepath!