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Cartwright said, beginning to breathe again, “I can count on you.” He pocketed the power card carefully.
    “I guess you can.” Shaeffer licked his lip reflectively. “It seems strange. … You’re now our superior and Verrick is nothing. It may be some time before we can make the psychological change-over. Some of the younger Corps members who don’t remember any other Quizmaster …” He shrugged. “I suggest you place yourself in Corps hands for a while. We can’t stay here, and a lot of people at Batavia have personal fealties to Verrick, not to the position. We’ll have to screen everybody and systematically weed them out. Verrick has been using them to gain control over the Hills.”
    “I’m not surprised.”
    “Verrick is shrewd.” Shaeffer measured Cartwright critically. “During his Quizmastership he was challenged repeatedly. There was always somebody filtering in. We were kept busy, but I suppose that’s what we’re for.”
    “I’m glad you came,” Cartwright admitted. “When I heard the noise I thought it was—Verrick.”
    “It would have been, if we had notified him.” There was grim amusement in Shaeffer’s eyes. “If it hadn’t been for the older teeps, we probably would have notified him first andtaken our time getting here. Peter Wakeman made a big thing of it. Responsibility and duty, that sort of thing.”
    Cartwright made a mental note. He could have to look up Peter Wakeman.
    “As we approached,” Shaeffer continued slowly, “our first group picked up the thoughts of a large group of people, apparently leaving here. Your name was in their minds, and this location.”
    Cartwright became instantly wary. “Oh?”
    “They were moving away from us, so we couldn’t catch much. Something about a ship. Something to do with a long flight.”
    “You sound like a Government fortuneteller.”
    “There was an intense field around them of excitement and fear.”
    “I can’t tell you anything,” Cartwright repeated, with emphasis. “I don’t know anything about it.” Ironically, he added: “Some creditors, perhaps.”
        In the courtyard outside the Society building Rita O’Neill paced around in a small, aimless circle, feeling suddenly lost. The great moment had come and passed; now it was part of history.
    Against the Society building rose the small, barren crypt in which the remains of John Preston lay. She could see his dark, ill-formed body suspended within the yellowed fly-specked plasti-cube, hands folded over his bird-like chest, eyes shut, glasses eternally superfluous. Small hands, crippled with arthritis, a hunched-over near-sighted creature. The crypt was dusty; trash and debris were littered around it. Stale rubbish the wind had blown there and left. Nobody came to see Preston’s remains. The crypt was a forgotten, lonely monument, housing a dismal shape of clay, impotent, discarded.
    But half a mile away the fleet of archaic cars was unloading its passengers at the field. The battered GM ore freighter wasjammed tight on the launcher; the people were clumsily climbing the narrow metal ramp into the unfamiliar hull.
    The fanatics were on their way. They were setting out for deep space to locate and claim the mythical tenth planet of the Sol System, the legendary Flame Disc, John Preston’s fabulous world, beyond the known universe.

THREE
    Before Cartwright reached the Directorate buildings at Batavia the word was out. He sat fixedly watching the tv screen, as the high-speed intercon rocket hurtled across the South Pacific sky. Below them were spread out blue ocean and endless black dots, conglomerations of metal and plastic house-boats on which Asiatic families lived, fragile platforms stretched from Hawaii to Ceylon.
    The tv screen was wild with excitement. Faces blinked on and off; scenes shifted with bewildering rapidity. The history of Verrick’s ten years was shown: shots of the massive, thick-browed ex-Quizmaster and résumés of what he had