og-marched away from Fay and something that
felt remarkably like the muzzle of a large-caliber gun was shoved in
the small of his back.

* * * * *

Under cover of Fay's outburst a huge crowd of people had entered the
room from the hall--eight, to be exact. But the weirdest thing about
them to Gusterson was that from the first instant he had the
impression that only one mind had entered the room and that it did not
reside in any of the eight persons, even though he recognized three of
them, but in something that they were carrying.

Several things contributed to this impression. The eight people all
had the same blank expression--watchful yet empty-eyed. They all moved
in the same slithery crouch. And they had all taken off their shoes.
Perhaps, Gusterson thought wildly, they believed he and Daisy ran a
Japanese flat.

Gusterson was being held by two burly women, one of them quite pimply.
He considered stamping on her toes, but just at that moment the gun
dug in his back with a corkscrew movement.

The man holding the gun on him was Fay's colleague Davidson. Some
yards beyond Fay's couch, Kester was holding a gun on Daisy, without
digging it into her, while the single strange man holding Daisy
herself was doing so quite decorously--a circumstance which afforded
Gusterson minor relief, since it made him feel less guilty about not
going berserk.

Two more strange men, one of them in purple lounging pajamas, the
other in the gray uniform of a slidewalk inspector, had grabbed Fay's
skinny upper arms, one on either side, and were lifting him to his
feet, while Fay was struggling with such desperate futility and
gibbering so pitifully that Gusterson momentarily had second thoughts
about the moral imperative to go berserk when menaced by hostile
force. But again the gun dug into him with a twist.

Approaching Fay face-on was the third Micro-man Gusterson had met
yesterday--Hazen. It was Hazen who was carrying--quite reverently or
solemnly--or at any rate very carefully the object that seemed to
Gusterson to be the mind of the little storm troop presently
desecrating the sanctity of his own individual home.

All of them were wearing ticklers, of course--the three Micro-men the
heavy emergent Mark 6s with their clawed and jointed arms and
monocular cephalic turrets, the rest lower-numbered Marks of the sort
that merely made Richard-the-Third humps under clothing.

The object that Hazen w