“What do you mean, help? You’re the best E.M.D. I could hire. If…”

“You’re neither thinking nor meaning that, Mr. Reich. You deliberately hired a 2^nd Class Esper in order to protect yourself in such an emergency. Now you’re paying the price of your caution. If you want the screaming to stop, you’ll have to consult one of the 1^st Class men… Say, Augustus Tate or Gart or Samuel @kins…”

“I’ll think about it,” Reich muttered and turned to go. As he opened the door, Breen called: “By the way… ‘We Transport You Into Transports’ is the slogan of the D’Courtney Cartel. How does that tie in with the alteration of ‘bort’ to ‘dort’? Think it over.”

“The Man With No Face!”

Without staggering, Reich slammed the door across the path from his mind to Breen and then lurched down the corridor toward his own suite. A wave of savage hatred burst over him. “He’s right. It’s D’Courtney who’s giving me the screams. Not because I’m afraid of him. I’m afraid of myself. Known all along. Known it deep down inside. Known that once I faced it I’d have to kill that D’Courtney bastard. It’s no face because it’s the face of murder.”

Fully dressed and in his wrong mind, Reich stormed out of his apartment and descended to the street where a Monarch Jumper picked him up and carried him in one graceful hop to the giant tower that housed the hundreds of floors and thousands of employees of Monarch’s New York Office. Monarch Tower was the central nervous system of an incredibly vast corporation, a pyramid of transportation, communication, heavy industry, manufacture, sales distribution, research, exploration, importation. Monarch Utilities & Resources, Inc. bought and sold, traded and gave, made and destroyed. Its pattern of subsidiaries and holding companies was so complex that it demanded the full-time services of a 2^nd Class Esper Accountant to trace the labyrinthine flow of its finances.

Reich entered his office, followed by his chief (Esper 3) secretary and her staff, bearing the litter of the morning’s work.

“Dump it and jet,” he growled.

They deposited the papers and recording crystals on his desk and departed hastily but without rancor. They were accustomed to his rages. Reich seated himself behind his desk, trembling with a fury that was already goring D’Courtney. Finally he muttered: “I’ll give the bastard one more chance.”

He unlocked his desk, opened the drawer-safe and withdrew the Executive’s Code Book, restricted to the executive heads of the firms listed quadruple A-1-* by Lloyds. He found most of the material he required in the middle pages of the book:

Marking his place in the code book, Reich flipped the v-phone on and said to the image of the interoffice operator: “Get me Code.”

The screen dazzled and cut to a smoky room cluttered with books and coils of tape. A bleached man in a faded shirt glanced at the screen, then leaped to attention.