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walls. After a while it became fixed on one particular mask on the far wall. After another while he walked slowly over to it and reached it down. As his fingers touched it, he smiled and his shoulders relaxed, as if it reassured him.
    It was the face of a devil—a green devil.
    He flipped a little smooth lever that could be operated by the tongue of the wearer and the eyes glowed brilliant red. Set unobtrusively in the cheeks just below the glowing eyes were the actual eyeholes of the mask—small, but each equipped with a fisheye lens so that the wearer would get a wide view.
    He laid down the mask reluctantly and from a heap of costumes picked up what looked like a rather narrow silver breastplate or corselet, stiffly metallic but hinged at one side for the convenience of the person putting it on. To it were attached strong wide straps, rather like those of a parachute. A thin cable led from it to a small button-studded metal cylinder that fit in the hand. He smiled again and touched one of the buttons and the hinged breastplate rose toward the ceiling, dangling its straps and dragging upward his other hand and arm. He took his finger off the button and the breastplate sagged toward the floor. He set the whole assembly beside the mask.
    Next he took up a wicked-looking pair of rather stiff gloves with homy claws set at the finger-ends. He also handled and set aside a loose one-piece suit.
    What distinguished both the gloves and the coverall was that they glowed whitely even in the moderately bright light of the Monsterarium.
    Finally he picked up from the piled costumes what looked at first like a large handful of nothing—or rather as if he had picked up a loose cluster of lenses and prisms made of so clear a material as to be almost invisible. In whatever direction he held it, the wall behind was distorted as if seen through a heat-shimmer or as reflected in a crazy-house mirror. Sometimes his hand holding it disappeared partly and when he thrust his other arm into it, that arm vanished.
    Actually what he was holding was a robe made of a plastic textile called light-flow fabric. Rather like lucite, the individual threads of the light-flow fabric carried or “piped” the light entering them, but unlike lucite they spilled such light after carrying it roughly halfway around a circular course. The result was that anything draped in licht-flow fabric became roughly invisible, especially against a uniform background.
    Dave laid down the light-flow fabric rather more reluctantly than he had put down the mask, breastplate and other items. It was as if he had laid down a twisting shadow.
    Then Dave clasped his hands behind him and began to pace. From time to time his features worked unpleasantly. The tempo of his pacing quickened. A smile came to his lips, worked into his cheeks, became a fixed, hard, graveyard grin.
    Suddenly he stopped by the pile of costumes, struck an attitude, commanded hoarsely, “My hauberk, knavel” and picked up the silver breastplate and belted it around him. He tightened the straps around his thighs and shoulders, his movements now sure and swift.
    Next, still grinning, he growled, “My surcoat, sirrahl” —and donned the glowing coverall.
    "Vizard!” "Gauntlets!” He put on the green mask and the clawed gloves.
    Then he took up the robe of light-flow fabric and started for the door, but he saw the scattered pink notes.
    He brushed them off the black blotter, found a white stylus, and gripping it with two fingers and thumb extended from slits in the righthand gauntlet, he wrote:
    Dear Bobbie, Dr. Gee, et al,
    By the time you read this, you will probably be hearing about me on the news channels. I’m doing one last bang-up public relations job for dear old IU. You can call it Cruxon’s Crusade—the One-Man Witchcraft. I’ve tried out the equipment before, but only experimentally. Not this time! This time when I’m finished, no one will be able to bury the Monster Program. Wish me luck on