“But when did you unearth all this?”

“After the case was closed, sir. When Reich attacked me for setting those booby-traps.”

“He claimed you did. He — But if you didn’t, Powell, who did?”

“Reich himself, sir.”

“Reich!”

“Yes, sir. He murdered his father. He discharged his hatred. But his super-ego… his conscience, could not permit him to go unpunished for such a horrible crime. Since the police apparently were unable to punish him, his conscience took over. That was the meaning of Reich’s nightmare image… The Man With No Face.”

“The Man With No Face?”

“Yes, Commissioner. It was the symbol of Reich’s real relationship to D’Courtney. The figure had no face because Reich could not accept the truth… that he had recognized D’Courtney as his father. The figure appeared in his dreams when he made the decision to kill his father. It never left him. It was first the threat of punishment for what he contemplated. Then it became the punishment itself for the murder.”

“The booby-traps?”

“Exactly. His conscience had to punish him. But Reich had never admitted to himself that he murdered because he hated D’Courtney as the father who had rejected and abandoned him. Therefore, the punishment had to take place on the unconscious level. Reich set those traps for himself without ever realizing it… in his sleep, somnambulistically… during the day, in short fugues… brief departures from conscious reality. The tricks of the mind-mechanism are fantastic.”

“But if Reich himself knew none of this… how did you get at it, Powell?”

“Well, sir. That was the problem. We couldn’t get it by peeping him. He was hostile and you have to have complete cooperation from a subject to get that kind of material. It takes months anyway. Also, if Reich recovered from the series of shocks he’d had, he would be able to readjust, reorient, and become immune to us. That was dangerous, too, because he was in a position of power to rock the solar system. He was one of those rare World-Shakers whose compulsions might have torn down our society and irrevocably committed us to his own psychotic pattern.”

Crabbe nodded.

“He very nearly succeeded. These men appear every so often… links between the past and the future. If they are permitted to mature… If the link is permitted to weld… The world finds itself chained to a dreadful tomorrow.”

“Then what did you do?”

“We used the Mass Cathexis Measure, sir. It’s difficult to explain, but I’ll do my best. Every human being has a psyche composed of latent and capitalized energy. Latent energy is our reserve… the untapped natural resources of our mind. Capitalized energy is that latent energy which we call up and put to work. Most of us use only a small portion of our latent energy.”

“I understand.”

“When the Esper Guild uses the Mass Cathexis Measure, every Esper opens his psyche, so to speak, and contributes his latent energy to a pool. One Esper alone taps this pool and becomes the canal for the latent energy. He captilizes it and puts it to work. He can accomplish tremendous things… if he can control it. It’s a difficult and dangerous operation. About on a par with jetting to the moon with a stick of dynamite stuck — er — riding on dynamite sticks…”