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machine to win. If you'd been a little cleverer—we can't touch you legally. But get the hell out and if we catch you in here again you won't live long enough to enjoy your winnings."
    A rough hand turned his pocket inside out. "You've made enough already," the man said, "forget about today's harvest. Now get!" A well-placed kick and Rondo stumbled out of the building into the street, under the great, brilliant artificial moon of the pleasure planet of Keef.
    He stood there, shaking like a whipped dog, numbly fingering his empty pockets. He had done it again. He had been banned, by now, from every gambling hall on Keef, just as he'd eventually worn out his welcome on four or five worlds just like it. Sooner or later they spotted him. It was the sickness of the compulsive gambler that kept him going back and back, that would not let him make a small killing, normal winnings, and get out, to play again some other day or week.
    He stood under the huge fake moon, with its rose-colored light, and hated, and hated. But mostly he hated himself. He had done this to himself; he knew it in his saner moments. The reason why was buried deep in a life where the strange thing which made him able to predict, to control the fall, was also buried—and had made him hated everywhere, even when he had used it (for a little while, long, long years ago) to warn, to help; to heal. And now the sickness he could never control kept him going back and back, to wipe out everything in the fever of the fall of a card, a ball.
    What could he do now? Hidden in his lodgings was less than his necessary getaway money. He was stranded here on Keef, and Spaceforce at this end of the Empire was far from the gentle with the indigent. On a planet of the affluent, the stranded, sick or impoverished were herded out of sight. He could perhaps find work as a bath attendant in the great pleasure houses euphemistically called the baths; he was neither young enough nor handsome enough for anything else there, even if the thing in his mind had allowed him to be that close to the average pleasure seeker on such a world as this. He could keep from sickening only by using all his forces on gambling . . .
    And now he was shut away even from that.
    His jaw tightened and his face was very ugly indeed. They had thrown him out because he won too often. Very well, let them see what they had done when they incurred his anger! The red overpowering rage of the poorly controlled psychotic began to flow across him. No matter what had done it to him. That was ages ago now. Now he only knew that he was barred from the one thing on the whole pleasure planet that held pleasure for him, the fall and spin and drift of a long-orbit ball, and he hurt, and he wanted revenge.
    He stood there motionless, his mind gripped on the one thing that made sense to him; the falling ball, the falling ball . . .
    Around him the world faltered, came to a stop. The thing in the telepath's semi-psychotic mind was paralyzing him and paralyzing, too, the one thing which made sense . . .
    Inside the gambling parlor, seventy puzzled gamblers and a croupier and a manager stared in dismayed incomprehension as the spinning, falling gilt fleck inside the machine hung suspended in mid-air, not moving.
    After half an hour of this, as the angry patrons began to drift into the night again in quest of other pleasures, Rondo came to himself and remembered to run. By then it was too late.
    They left him finally, bloody, bleeding and more than nine-tenths dead, lying in the gutter of a darkened alley, to be found moaning there an hour later by two Spaceforce men who didn't know who he was, gave him the benefit of the doubt, and took him to a hospital. And there he stayed for a long, long time . . .
    When the world began to go round again under him, he had two visitors.
     
    "Darkover," Rondo said, not believing, "why in the name of all that's unholy would I want to go there? All I know about Darkover is that it's a cold hell