When Carla entered the kitchen late that morning, Ken was on the phone and his mother was squeezing orange juice. From a pot on the stove came the gentle “plop-plop” of oatmeal cooking. The wholesome fragrance, the homey sound, the instant welcoming hug that Mrs. Inman gave her lent a restorative normalcy to life.

Ken was turning out the light in his study when he heard the stifled scream. He raced across the adjoining living room and down the hall toward Carla’s room. He flung open the door and burst in. The hooded figure leaning over the bed released Carla and turned quickly to meet this challenge.

There was no mistaking the tall figure, the full-length monk’s robe, and the deliberate, almost flowing movements. For one brief moment of confusion and indecision, Ken wondered how Del Sasso had gotten in. Then he understood...

After an early dinner in her room, Carla lay in bed flicking the television channels back and forth, trying to find something that held her interest, and hoping most of all that she would somehow doze off. Getting to sleep was becoming a nightly problem. At last she turned off the TV and lay in the dark, going over recent events and conversations and wrestling with her own thoughts.

When they had arrived back at the lab complex late that afternoon, no one had felt like doing anything further that day. The meeting with the Archons had been too emotionally draining, and their announcements so exhilarating. Frank had given everyone the evening off. Yet the sleep Carla needed so desperately eluded her.

The circle of unearthly creatures opened as suddenly as it had closed. Viktor and Carla watched in stunned bewilderment as their three colleagues walked slowly back toward them. The pyramid disappeared instantly, and the Nine vanished with it. When Leighton, Del Sasso, and Morris had resumed their original places facing the strange craft just in front of Viktor and Carla, they put their palms together and bowed nine times again. The vibrating “OM” faded and in its place a strange whirring sound arose and grew in volume. To their consternation, Viktor and Carla realized that the UFO had swung around to point in their direction. It was gathering speed and heading directly toward them.

“I see a Pulitzer prize in your future!” The sound of the exaggerated gypsy accent pompously intoned, caused Carla to look up from her computer with a start. Del Sasso was standing in the open doorway to her office, acting the consummate fortune-teller. “Yes, I see the world of journalism worshiping at your feet.”

“We lost four good and brave men,” intoned Leighton. “Men who believed in what we’re doing and gave their lives in the line of duty. We will not dishonor them and their memory—or the bereaved families they left behind—by abandoning the noble cause to which they had dedicated themselves. Let this be a time of solemn rededication to the high-minded ideals of international goodwill among all peoples and nations.”

Chernov and his men moved swiftly to get the surveillance camera back into place. Both corpses were dragged up next to the inside door, out of the camera’s normal viewing angle. One of the men put on a flak jacket that had been quickly stripped from a body. His hair and weight were similar to those of one of the dead men, and from the rear he could pass the periodic cursory look from the security control center inside. Quickly the camera was moved back. Then they waited. Two minutes seemed an eternity, but it was absolutely essential to protect the identity of their agent on the inside. When the last second had been counted—leaving the new “guard” peering out the small window toward the road—Chernov led his other two men into the complex, closing the door securely behind them.

The isolated stretch of access road was empty when Carla at last drove out to the main highway after leaving the installation. She had, of course, no knowledge of the deadly drama that had been acted out along that route earlier. Nor did she know that she had reached its juncture with the main road just minutes before the back-up FBI team assigned to escort her arrived. Consequently, the men sat waiting for nearly an hour before they were belatedly notified that she had already driven to Palo Alto.

While praying for Carla the next morning, Ken felt overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility for the part he had played in leading her into her present danger. After all, he had introduced her to the field of psychic research and encouraged her to ever-deeper involvement even when she’d had little interest in it herself and her editors at that time had not been supportive of this new direction her writing was taking. She wouldn’t be associated with Frank and heading for who could say what ultimate delusion or destruction at the hands of “the Nine” had it not been for his influence in the past. That realization became an overpowering burden.

When Leighton returned to his office, he found Del Sasso in a relaxed and affable mood, sitting in an easy chair deep in conversation with Carla and Viktor. They had been probing him with pointed questions about the dangers of the incredible psychic power they had just seen him display. What if it got into the wrong hands? And how could that possibility, after all, be prevented if psychic power was simply a normal human potential and thus available equally to everyone? What a frightful world it would be if every person had such dangerous capabilities—a world of sorcerers zapping one another with unlimited powers of the mind!