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accomplished. There were vague reports on Cartwright.
    He had to laugh, in a nervous aside that made the teeps start. Nothing was known about him, only that he was somehow connected with the Preston Society. The newsmachines had dug up as much as possible on the Society: it wasn’t much. There were fragments of the story of John Preston himself, the tiny frail man creeping from the Information Libraries to the observatories, writing his books, collecting endless facts,arguing futilely with the pundits, losing his precarious classification, and finally sinking down and dying in obscurity. The meager crypt was erected. The first meeting of the Society was held. The printing of Preston’s half-crazed, half-prophetic books was begun. …
    Cartwright hoped that was all they knew. He kept his mental fingers crossed and his eyes on the tv screen.
    He was now the supreme power of the nine-planet system. He was the Quizmaster, surrounded by a telepathic Corps, with a vast army and warfleet and police force at his disposal. He was unopposed administrator of the random bottle structure, the vast apparatus of classification, Quizzes, lotteries, and training schools.
    On the other hand, there were the five Hills, the industrial framework that supported the social and political system.
    “How far did Verrick get?” he asked Major Shaeffer.
    Shaeffer glanced into his mind to see what he wanted. “Oh, he did fairly well. By August he would have eliminated the random twitch and the whole M-Game structure.”
    “Where is Verrick now?”
    “He left Batavia for the Farben Hill, where he’s strongest. He’ll operate from there; we caught some of his plans.”
    “I can see your Corps is going to be valuable.”
    “Up to a point. Our job is to protect you: that’s all we do. We’re not spies or secret agents. We merely guard your life.”
    “What’s been the ratio in the past?”
    “The Corps came into existence a hundred and sixty years ago. Since then we’ve protected fifty-nine Quizmasters. Of that number we’ve been able to save eleven from the Challenge.”
    “How long did they last?”
    “Some a few minutes, some several years. Verrick lasted about the longest, although there was old McRae, back in ’78, who ran his whole thirteen years. For him the Corps intercepted over three hundred Challengers; but we couldn’t havedone it without McRae’s help. He was a wily bastard. Sometimes I think he was a teep.”
    “A telepathic Corps,” Cartwright mused, “which protects me. And public assassins to murder me.”
    “Only one assassin at a time. Of course, you could be murdered by an amateur unsanctioned by the Convention. Somebody with a personal grudge. But that’s rare. He wouldn’t get anything out of it except the loss of his p-card. He’d be politically neutralized; he’d be barred from becoming Quizmaster. And the bottle would have to be stepped ahead one twitch. A thoroughly unsatisfactory event.”
    “Give me my length ratio.”
    “Average, two weeks.”
    Two weeks, and Verrick was shrewd. The Challenge Conventions wouldn’t be sporadic affairs put together by isolated individuals, hungry for power. Verrick would have everything organized. Efficient, concerted machinery would be turning out one assassin after another, creeping and crawling toward Batavia without end, until at last the goal was reached and Leon Cartwright was destroyed.
    “In your mind,” Shaeffer said, “is an interesting vortex of the usual fear and a very unusual syndrome I can’t analyze. Something about a ship.”
    “You’re permitted to scan whenever you feel like it?”
    “I can’t help it. If I sat here mumbling and talking you couldn’t help hearing me. When I’m with a group their thoughts blur, like a party of people all babbling at once. But there’s just you and me here.”
    “The ship is on its way,” Cartwright said.
    “It won’t get far. The first planet it tries to squat, Mars or Jupiter or