makings of his rescue party that he didn't see the wall open up behind him.

There was a squeak of rubber tires and he whirled to see Hafitz, in his wheelchair, slamming toward him. The fat man's hand held a weird-looking gun.

The young man recoiled. His back pushed against a row of control buttons.

Then everything went white.

Paul Asher blinked his eyes, like a man awakening from a vivid dream.

The house lights went on and the manager of the theater came on the stage. He stood in front of the blank master screen with its checkerboard pattern of smaller screens, on which the several lines of action had taken place simultaneously. Paul took off his selectorscope spectacles with the earphone attachments.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the manager said. "I regret very much having to announce that this vicarion of the production Spies from Space was defective. The multifilm has broken and, because of the complexity of the vikie process, it will be impossible to splice it without returning it to the laboratory.

"Ushers are at the exits with passes good for any future performance. Those of you who prefer can exchange them at the box office for a full refund of your admission price."

Paul Asher unstrapped the wired canvas band from across his chest. He put the selectorscope spectacles into the pouch on the arm of the seat and walked out of the R.K.O. Vicarion into High Street and around the corner to where his car was parked.

His roommate at the communapt, MacCloy, was still up when he got there, going over some projectos. Mac snapped off the screen and quickly swept the slides together and into a case.

"You're back early," MacCloy said.

"The multifilm broke," Paul told him.

"Oh." Mac seemed abstracted, as he often did, and again Paul wondered about this man he knew so casually and who had never confided in him about anything—especially about his government job.

"So I missed the ending," Paul said. "I guess it was near the end, anyhow. The space patrol was on the way, but the villain, that Hafitz, was just about to blast me with his gun and I don't know how I would have got out of that."

"I remember that," Mac said. He laughed. "You must have been Positive all the way through. Like I was when I saw it. If you'd had any negative reactions—if you'd leaned back against the strap instead of forward—you'd have been at some other point in the multiplot and I wouldn't have recognized that part. Want me to tell you how it ends?"

"Go ahead. Then if I do see it again I'll change the ending somewhere along the line with a lean-back."

"Okay. There really wasn't much more. It takes so much film to provide all the plot choices that they can't make them very long.

"Well, Hafitz blasts me and misses," Mac went on, "—or blasts you and misses, to keep it in your viewpoint. When you jump back, you set off a bunch of controls. That was the control room, too, not just the communications room. Well, those controls you lean back against take the ship out of automatic pilot and send it into some wild acrobatics and that's why Hafitz misses. Also it knocks him out of the wheelchair so he's helpless and you get his gun. Also you see that the plans are still there—right where you put them, stuck to the bottom of his wheelchair."

"So that was it," said Paul.

"Yes," said Mac. "And then you cover Hafitz while he straightens out the ship and you rendezvous with the space control and they take you all into custody. You get a citation from the government. That's about it. Corny, huh?"

"But what about the girl?" Paul asked. "Is she really a spy?"

"Girl? What girl?"

"Naomi, her name was," Paul said. "You couldn't miss her. She was in the vikie right at the beginning—that brunette in the fast car."

"But there wasn't any girl, Paul," Mac insisted. "Not when I saw it."

"Of course there was. There had to be—the vikies all start