ed."

"I'll send over half a dozen guards just the same. Hold it."

The men came running from barracks, where they must have been waiting
for a call to arms, and closed in. It was a ring of tight faces and
wary eyes and pointing guns. They feared him and the fear made them
deadly. Elena's countenance was wholly blank.

"Let's go," she said.

A man walked some feet ahead of the prisoner, casting glances behind
him all the time. There was one on either side, the rest were at the
rear. Elena walked among them, her weapon never wavering from his
back. They went down the long handsome corridor and stood on the
purring escalator. Dalgetty's eyes roved with a yearning in them--how
much longer, he wondered, would he be able to see anything at all?

The door to Bancroft's study was ajar and Tighe's voice drifted out.
It was a quiet drawl, unshaken despite the blow it must have been to
hear of Dalgetty's recapture. Apparently he was continuing a
conversation begun earlier:

"... science goes back a long way, actually. Francis Bacon speculated
about a genuine science of man. Poole did some work along those lines
as well as inventing the symbolic logic which was to be such a major
tool in solving the problem.

"In the last century a number of lines of attack were developed. There
was already the psychology of Freud and his successors, of course,
which gave the first real notion of human semantics. There were the
biological, chemical and physical approaches to man as a mechanism.
Comparative historians like Spengler, Pareto and Toynbee realized that
history did not merely happen but had some kind of pattern.

"Cybernetics developed such concepts as homeostasis and feedback,
concepts which were applicable to individual man and to society as a
whole. Games theory, the principle of least effort and Haeml's
generalized epistemology pointed toward basic laws and the analytical
approach.

"The new symbologies in logic and mathematics suggested
formulations--for the problem was no longer one of gathering data so
much as of finding a rigorous symbolism to handle them and indicate
new data. A great deal of the Institute's work has lain simply in
collecting and synthesizing all these earlier findings."

Dalgetty felt a rush of admiration. Trapped and helpless among enemies
made ruthless by ambition and fear, Michael Tighe could still play
with them. He must have been stalling for hours, staving off drugs
and torture by revealing