Rolf grunted and rubbed a hand across his brow. Lynne offered him a tumbler of lichenwasser, but he shuddered and turned away from her. “You _marlet!_” he said rudely. “Can’t you be serious for once?” Lynne repressed a smile. She had not had a hangover since one school holiday, when she had consumed an entire bottle of crême de menthe alone in a hotel room on Earth--but thanks to their telepathic rapport she knew how Rolf felt. Furthermore, in view of her discovery, she understood what had happened to make him so boisterously uninhibited of late, just as she understood her own increased primness. Both of them had been in telepathic relay contact with the mysterious new entity that had caused the restlessness at Nampura Depot and, ultimately, had killed Juan Olsen. Although Lynne had been in spasmodic telepathic touch with her twin brother, Revere, when the necro-recorder was used on him, shortly after her arrival on Mars, it was the first time she had been present at an actual demonstration of the dangerous instrument that had, until the psycho-muffler was discovered, either killed or driven permanently insane the persons on whom it had been employed. Its original purpose had been to present visualization, as on an old-fashioned colored television screen, of the thoughts of a man or woman about to die--to reveal them and make it possible to record them. In bygone years it had been a police-force stand-by, one of the miracle gadgets that had all but wiped out crime on Earth and Mars. She sat in a chair against a wall of the infirmary operating room, while the unconscious Indo-Italian was wheeled in on an operating wagon, her dusky face ash-white above the cloth that covered the pronounced curves of her tiny body. She watched while Rolf, abetted by the Depot practitioner, deftly applied the electrodes behind the girl’s ears, just over the sensitive mastoid areas, and then went to the grid-screen tuner and said to the practitioner, “Ready, Hambri?” “Ready, Rolf,” said the practitioner quietly. “Try to tune fast. This girl is in a dangerous state of shock and we don’t want to expose her to any needless added risks.” “We don’t want to--but we have to,” said Rolf grimly. Watching him, Lynne felt her fingernails dig into the palms of her hands. She was in perfect telepathic rapport with him and understood the tension, the very real emotional concern and sense of responsibility toward the girl that underlay his ruthlessness. And she knew she had never before understood or loved him so deeply and well. Almost before she had savored the thought, the grid-screen was flashing a kaleidoscope of wild color. Purples, deep reds, turquoise blues, ivory, yellows, rolled aimlessly around the screen, superseding one another in erratic sequence. Rolf cursed and worked with the tuner but only the vaguest shapes emerged. Lynne felt herself grow taut.