incorporated. No headquarters, no officers that anybody knew about. They just were. It was a complete mystery how a man became a Supremist, how they kept getting new members all the time. Yet you couldn't miss a Supremist whenever you met one. Before the conversation was half over he'd start spouting about the destiny of Earthmen and the general inferiority of all other creatures and so on. It sounded like hogwash to Pell. He wondered how such an attitude could survive in a scientific age.

Nor would a Supremist be essentially a moron or a neurotic; they were found in all walks of life, at all educational and emotional levels. Rysland told how he had questioned a few, trying to discover when, where and how they joined the movement: Apparently there was nothing to join, at least to hear them tell it. They just knew one day that they were Supremists, and that was the word. Rysland had shaken his head sadly and said, "Their belief is completely without logic—and maybe that's what makes it so strong. Maybe that's what frightens me about it."

Okay, tomorrow then Pell would tackle it. Tomorrow he'd think about it. Right now he had a date with his best girl.

He entered the cafe and the music of the askarins swirled more loudly about his head and he looked through the smoke and colored light until he spotted Ciel sitting in a rear booth. The place was crowded. On the small dance floor before the orchestra nearly nude Venusian girls were going through the writhing motions of a serpentine dance. Their greenish skins shimmered iridescently. The sad-faced Venusian musicians on the band-stand waved their graceful, spatulated fingers over their curious, boxlike askarins, producing changing tones and overtones by the altered capacitance. A rocketman in the black and silver uniform of the Space Force was trying to stumble drunkenly out on to the floor with the dancers and his friends were holding him back. There was much laughter about the whole thing. The Venusian girls kept dancing and didn't change their flat, almost lifeless expressions.

Ciel looked up without smiling when he got to the booth. She had a half-finished glass of meth before her.

He tried a smile anyway. "Hello, baby." He sat down.

She said, "I didn't really think you'd get here. I could have had dates with exactly eleven spacemen. I kept count."

"You have been faithful to me, Cynara, in your fashion. I need a drink and don't want to wait for the waitress. Mind?" He took her half glass of meth and tossed it down. He felt the wonderful illusion of an explosion in his skull, and it seemed to him that his body was suddenly the strongest in the world and that he could whip everybody in the joint with one arm tied behind his back. He said, "Wow."

Ciel tried a smile now. "It does that to you when you're not used to it."

The first effect passed and he felt only the warmth of the drink. He signaled a waitress and ordered a couple more. "Don't forget to remind me to take a hangover pill before I go to work in the morning," he told Ciel.

"You—you are going to work in the morning, then?"

"Afraid I can't get out of it."

"And the moon trip's off?"

"Not off, just postponed. We'll get to it, don't worry."

"Dick."

"Yes?"

"I can take it just so long, putting our vacation off and off and off." Her eyes were earnest, liquid and opaque. "I've been thinking about it. Trying to arrive at something. I'm beginning to wonder, Dick, if maybe we hadn't just better, well—call it quits, or something."

He stared at her. "Baby, what are you saying?"

A sudden, fanfare-like blast from the orchestra interrupted. They looked at the dance floor. There was a flash of light, a swirling of mist, and within the space of a second the Venusian girls suddenly disappeared and their place was taken by a tall, hawk-nosed, dark-eyed man with a cloak slung dramatically over one shoulder. The audience applauded.

"That's Marco, the new mentalist," said Pell.

Ciel shrugged to show that she wasn't particularly impressed. Neither was Pell, to tell the truth. Mentalists were all the rage, partly because everybody could practice a little amateur telepathy and hypnotism in his own home. Mentalists, of course, made a career of it and were much better at it than anybody else.

Their drinks came and they watched Marco go through his act in a rather gloomy silence. Marco was skillful, but not especially unusual. He did the usual stuff: calling out things that people wrote on slips of paper, calling out dates on coins, and even engaging in mental duels wherein the challenger wrote a phrase, concealed it from Marco, and then deliberately tried to keep him from reading it telepathically. He had the usual hypnotism session with volunteers who were certain they could resist. He made them hop around the stage like monkeys, burn their fingers on pieces of ice, and so on. The audience roared with laughter. Pell and Ciel just kept staring.

When Marco had finished his act and the thundering applause had faded the Venusian dancing girls came back on the stage again.

Ciel yawned.

Pell said, "Me, too. Let's get out of here."

It wasn't until they were home in their underground apartment and getting ready for bed that Ciel turned to him and said, "You see?"

He was buttoning his pajamas. "See what?"

"It's us, Dick. It's not the floor show, or the meth, or anything—it's us. We can't enjoy anything together any more."

He said, "Now wait a minute...."

But she had already stepped into the bedroom and slammed the door. He heard the lock click.

"Hey," he said, "what am I supposed to do, sleep out here?"

He took the ensuing silence to mean that he was.

And he did.

The next morning, as he came into the office, Pell scowled deeply and went to his desk without saying good morning to anybody. Ciel had kept herself locked in the bedroom and he had made his own breakfast. How it was all going to end he didn't know. He had the feeling that she was working herself up to the decision to leave him. And the real hell of it was that he couldn't exactly blame her.

"Morning, partner," said a voice above him. He looked up. Way up. Steve Kronski was built along the general lines of a water buffalo. The usual battered grin was smeared across his face. "I see we got a new assignment."

"Oh—did Larkin brief you on it already?"

"Yeah. Before I could get my hat off. Funny set-up, all right. I punched for basic data before you got in. Hardly any."

"Maybe that means something in itself. Maybe somebody saw to it that the information never got into the central banks."

The C.I.B. computers could be hooked into the central banks which stored information on nearly everything and everybody. If you incorporated, filed for a patent, paid taxes, voted, or just were born, the central banks had an electronic record of it.

Kronski jerked his thumb toward the computer room. "I punched for names of Supremist members coupla minutes ago. Thought maybe we could start in that way."

Pell followed, his mind not really on the job yet. He wasn't at his best working with the computers, and yet operating them was ninety per cent of investigation. He supposed he'd get used to it sometime.

Three walls of the big computer room were lined with control racks, consisting mostly of keyboard setups. Code symbols and index cards were placed in handy positions. The C.I.B. circuits, of course, were adapted to the specialized work of investigation. In the memory banks of tubes and relays there was a master file of all names—aliases and nicknames included—with which the organization had ever been concerned. Criminals, witnesses, complaints, everyone. Code numbers linked to the names showed where data on their owner could be found. A name picked at random might show that person to have data in the suspect file, the arrest file, the psychological file, the