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remember it. Yet still it seemed simpler to kill me or to hold me incommunicado until the time for testimony was over. Evidently they wanted more from me than my silence.
    Despite my isolation and physical discomfort, I experienced a burgeoning sense of well-being. Why was this? My suspicious mind wanted a reason.
    That wasn't long in appearing. Obviously I had been drugged. That drink Scar had served me—not straight alcohol but something sinisterly potent.
    Still, why? Why drug a helpless captive? That didn't make sense, unless...
    Unless it was addictive. Hook a man on a drug, make him an addict, when you control the source of supply, and that man is yours. What had I fallen into?
    I experienced rapid panic, then quelled it. The drug was making me emotionally unstable. Whatever was happening to me was happening, and I could not prevent it. They could dose me with the drug by force if I tried to resist; repeatedly, until the addiction was complete. I wasn't really worried, and though I knew this was probably false optimism sponsored by the drug and by my resignation to the situation, still I felt all right. For one thing I had a secret weapon: the coded message. Maybe that had the answer to my problem.
    I concentrated on that. My mind seemed preternaturally sharp; my sensation of well-being seemed to extend into the brain tissues themselves. Was this a genuine enhancement of mental prowess or a hallucinogenic illusion? I tried multiplying numerical figures in my head and seemed to be facile at it. My more important challenge was to solve the riddle of the coded message. If the enhancement were real, this would be the best time to do it. If not—what did I have to lose?
    —like a diminishing progression, one element of the figure deleted with each repetition.
    Then added again—no, that wasn't it. My original childhood chart did seem to be the likely key. Three grids could cover the alphabet, but what about spacing and punctuation? I checked further along the message and found some figures with little Os in them. So there was a fourth grid, making thirty-six representations. The alphabet, plus ten spots for other marks.
    Then I had another notion. There was my alphabet—not in any direct ratio but in my head! A through Z
    and ten punctuation marks. There needed to be no symbol-letter connection; the symbols merely could be instructions on how to select the letters of the mental font. A simple displacement could do it, the symbols standing for numbers that showed how far to count for the proper letter: And so on. The first, second, and third letter of the alphabet. So the message would be 13 4 7 25 11
    13, translating to the corresponding...
    Um, no. That was still a direct translation. It was pointless to interpose numbers if they only stood for letters. That was too easy to crack and needed no input from my unique experience.
    Still, I felt that numbers were part of the answer. Displacement—not from a set alphabet but from a random one— that would be tough indeed to crack.
    And, in my drugged brilliance I fathomed the next stage of the answer. That random alphabet—it didn't have to be an alphabet at all, just a series of starting points. P, Q, X, Y, Z—anything would do. Then the coded numbers could count off from those points. 13 4 7 25 11 13—count off thirteen from the first starting point, four from the second, seven from the third. Thirteen from the P would be off the end of the alphabet, into the punctuation. Did that make sense? Perhaps not, but that only meant that P wasn't the proper starting point; it was just my random guess. Find the correct starting points and the rest would follow.
    How could I discover a random series of starting points? The answer was that I couldn't. So, they probably only seemed random. They could be represented by a key phrase or sentence—one that only I would devise. There was the true virtue of such a system: its personification. No one else could crack the code because no