“They separated us—thank God.”

“Why thank God?”

“They were trying to make me kill her—” Suddenly, he stared at Taylor. “Come to that, why haven’t they killed you?”

From the doorway, the Negro’s voice lilted pleasantly in reply.

“You know why, Mr. Brent. We’re a peaceful people. We don’t kill our enemies.” Taylor and Brent saw his beatific smile. “We get our enemies to kill each other.” The Negro paused, then directed his next remark to Taylor. “It takes two to make a quarrel. With whom could you quarrel, Mr. Taylor, while you were alone?”

Brent shuddered, knowing what that could mean. Taylor didn’t. He advanced belligerently on the Negro, hands bunching.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” he snarled, showing the erosion that imprisonment had worked on him and his will power.

“But I do,” Brent said. “Unfortunately.”

The Negro closed his eyes.

Brent braced himself, steeling his will against the mental assault he knew was underway. Taylor gawked at him, puzzled. The gawk widened as he saw Brent’s hands come up, fashion themselves into fists. Brent had assumed an aggressive, fighting position! He could see the perspiration breaking out on Brent’s face. But, incredibly—impossibly—his own hands were coming up, knotting into fists, and he felt his brain grow cold with hate and the desire to crush, hurt, maim.

Taylor confronted Brent.

Brent confronted Taylor.

The Negro, eyes still closed, remained in the doorway.

The glare of the cell was white, stark, ugly.

The smiles had drained from the two astronauts. Both faces began to twitch under the hammer blows of hypnosis.

Vainly resisting, Brent gasped, “I am fighting an order! I . . . am . . . fighting . . . a FRIEND!”

With that, he lashed out with a terrible left to the jutting promontory of Taylor’s chin.

The fight was vicious, savage.

Both men, friends, in the grip of a power willing them not merely to hurt, but to murder each other—with no lethal holds barred and no dirty killer’s tricks left untried—collided in the center of the room. Taylor gouged at Brent’s eyes. Brent swung a violent foot into Taylor’s groin. The sound of the encounter was prodigious. They locked in the death grip of brutal close combat. Kicking, gouging, biting, clawing, tearing at each other like two wild animals. Grunts, groans and curses filled the cell. The Negro, eyes screwed tightly shut, stood unmoving in the doorway. His face might have been carved out of marble.

Taylor caught Brent in a powerful viselike hold, swung him like a rag doll and then battered him with his head, butting like a ram. Brent kicked out with his legs. He caught Taylor in the pit of the stomach. Taylor let go and Brent broke loose. For a long second both men were free of each other, circling warily, waiting for the next opening. Their faces were bloody masks, their teeth exposed in brutal animal snarls. They were all but spitting at one another. The savage code of the jungle. Survival of the fittest, the law of fang and claw. They were slavering, gasping and grunting. Two mockeries of intelligent life.

The Negro, eyes still shut, dug into his white robes and produced two weapons. Two shining short knives with hafts of ebony. These he threw unseeing into the center of the room. The knives clattered onto the floor. As if they had been thrown a bone, Taylor and Brent instantly swept up the weapons. Now the fight assumed a deadlier overtone. An aura of the slaughter house hung about the cell, a charnel atmosphere which had eons and eras of brutality, prehistoric violence and unthinking savagery as its questionable guide.

Brent and Taylor went at each other still more viciously.

There was the sharp, ringing strike of metal against metal, the fierce muted thunder of men breathing like animals, gulping oxygen with bestial rapidity. Snarling, snapping, biting, digging at one another as if the universe depended on this one single encounter to give anything of life meaning, sense.

The Negro stood through it all, back against the door, holding it open, silently waiting for the outcome that had to be the death of one or both men. The stunning waves of traumatic hypnosis held Brent and Taylor in a dazzling, relentless hold which would not loosen until the Negro opened his eyes.

The barren little cell permitted no escape. No headway. No room in which to maneuver to advantage. Like the suicidal duels of ancient times, both combatants were committed to a battle from which neither could possibly emerge unscathed or unmarked. Blood would tell.

It was falling now, spurting from cuts and slices and minor wounds which only served to make Brent and Taylor go at each other all the stronger with their lunging, stabbing thrusts. The Negro maintained his position.

And the outcome drew nearer.

Inevitable, like something preordained.

The fight was now at its sharpest pitch.

There was about it that ferocity that lent it an animal quality. Except that it was easier to kill with a knife than to rend and tear a man to bloody fragments.

Brent moved like a ferret, hacking out at the bigger man.

He made a score. Blood spurted from Taylor’s side as the knife bit in and pulled out again.

Taylor roared from deep in his chest, bounded forward, and Brent found himself face to face with finality. Now the death dance began, with the two of them reeling around the narrow white cell, knives going for each other’s bared throats; then hand to hand, each holding onto the enemy knife aimed now at his own heart.

And then there was an interruption.

Nova materialized in the door behind the Negro.

She saw Taylor, saw the fight. The shock and the joy combined in one mammoth surge of emotion that needed some outlet, some vent through which to escape. Some avenue along which to meet the world.

The miracle occurred.

Nova’s neck muscles arched, her lips parted and she spoke.

The name.

The magic word.

“Tay-lor . . .”

The word was tinny, faint, a faraway sound but as crystal-clear in quality as the first word spoken by a schooled deaf child. As can happen with a mute who is not necessarily deaf, the girl had managed the very first word of her life.

And Taylor heard her.

And Brent heard her.

And, fatally for him, the Negro also heard her. He made the mistake of opening his eyes.

Brent sobbed, the magical change sweeping over his brain.

“His eyes are open.”

Taylor staggered back, equally freed of the mental lock. Brent jumped forward, knife upraised, and plunged the point of the blade into the Negro’s heart. The white-robed figure threshed against the door, then lurched forward into the cell. Brent watched, panting. The knife protruded from the reddening folds of the white robe. The Negro plucked at it ineffectually, his hands pawing feebly. Away from the door, his weight free of it, the barrier swung shut with a slam. There was no handle on the inner side of the cell. Brent was too late to catch the door before it closed. There was the click of an automatic lock.

Eyes glazed, the Negro blurted, “Unto God . . . I reveal . . .” His bloodstained hands tore at the rubberized mask of his features, “my Inmost S-s-s-se . . .”

He fell flat on his face before he could complete the gesture. Taylor, bathed in sweat, crouched over his prostrate body, his eyes almost insane. Brent suddenly retched; a ratchety cough of pain. Taylor went to him, seeing the widening stain of blood from a place in Brent’s shoulder where his own knife had drawn blood. Nova had come forward to assist him, both of them trying to stanch the flow of red from Brent’s wound. It was an awesome slice across the deltoid. Taylor quickly cut strips from the dead Negro’s white robe to fashion a crude but serviceable bandage. Brent winced painfully. Taylor worked fast, conscious of Nova hovering at his side. The girl was smiling despite everything.