around one of the city's
palaces.

Hanlon finally heard His Highness call, "Panek, you and the others bring
me the hypodermic. We'll have to give him the truth serum. I'm sorry,
Hanlon," he addressed himself now to the young man, "but this is the
only way. I hope we won't have to use enough to harm you, but that
depends on your co-operation. If you will tell us the truth quickly and
willingly I can, as I said ... uh ... use you, and you will profit
greatly by it."

Hanlon didn't struggle when they bound him firmly in the chair with
manacles on hands and feet. He knew it would be useless anyway. He let
his body slump into his chair, and again directed his mind through that
vent. He must not let them defeat him! He had to survive--to get
word--to the Corps!

Then his searching mind contacted another--a weak, primitive one, but a
mind. Avidly he fastened onto it, merged with it ... and found himself
inside the brain of one of those Simonidean pigeons.

Ah! This is wonderful! Pigeons seldom fly alone. Where you find one you
almost always find a number. Activating the bird's brain he sent out a
call to others of its kind that it had found food in abundance. Soon
more and more of them flew down to where the now enslaved pigeon was
standing, and as each one came, Hanlon sent into its brain all of his
mind it would hold.

Inside the cellar room His Highness rose and stepped up to Hanlon's
body, the hypodermic in his hand. "Remove his coat and roll up his
sleeve," he directed Panek, and the small part of Hanlon's mind still
remaining in his body felt the latter doing so, and an instant later,
the prick of the needle.

Slowly at first, then with increasing swiftness he felt his remaining
mind growing numb and his will weaken. His body slumped against the
restraining manacles.

"Can you hear me, George Hanlon?" he dimly heard His Highness' voice.

"Yes." It sounded like a whisper.

"Are you a member of the Inter-Stellar Corps?"

"I ... I ...", he struggled not to answer.

"Tell me!"

"I ... I ..." and then, in a last desperate effort to keep from telling
what he must not tell, George Hanlon did a thing he had never dared
attempt before. He sent all the remaining parts of his mind into the
last of the pigeons.

One of the first birds he had already sent into the ventilator so he
could look through it into the room below. He got it there just in time
to hear the Leader's gasp of dismay as he saw Hanlon's body slum