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the entertainment world. He is at first employed as a psionics engineer, to assist in turning out some of the new entertainments.
    The particular entertainment he first deals with took its inspiration from the worship of Diana at Nemi—the King of the Wood, who reigns until slain by his successor. In the program “Public Enemy,” a cynical director has worked out an arrangement to give the public what he thinks it wants: sex, glamour, mystery, danger, wealth, triumph and disaster—all vicarious for the public, but real for the people involved. Dan Candella is the reigning Public Enemy, a glorified gangster. In a typical drama, he is permitted to pick up a beautiful girl who wants the rewards of stardom, and a man who wants the girl is permitted to pursue her and to fight Candella for the girl and for his own crown. Their thoughts and emotions and sensations are picked up and recorded on tape. Everything has to be edited, doctored up for the public—in this entertainment Warneke is assigned the work on, the girl is a cheap and selfish individual who surrendered to Candella without a second thought of the man she left behind, who was tricked into entering the contest for her and actually murdered—though of course he had signed waivers for the legal department, and his death was technically an accident.
    Anyhow, Warneke doesn’t care for that sort of thing, so far from his idealistic purpose, and he doubts that the public does. He starts a campaign of protest, but gradually finds out that he is trapped—though it takes a certain amount of time and detective work for him to find out why.
    That’s the situation, as well as I’ve been able to work it out. As the plot develops, Warneke and the girl he has met at Quill River become trapped themselves in the Public Enemy Program, in some such way is this:
    There was another engineer, who was employed to doctor the tapes and to put in the unconscious suggestions that sold soap flakes. He got fed up with the job, and planned to go to Senator Hansen, a liberal politician who is fighting to break up the psionics monopoly and put it under legal control. He removed from the company safe a number of the original undoctored tapes—including interviews between the head of the company and the political puppets that are about to be elected by voters under psionic compulsion. Before he could reach Hansen, however, Blinn was murdered by Candella—because his change of loyalties had been discovered. The tapes, the loss of which was not immediate discovered, have been left in the hands of the heroine—who is the secretary of the producer, Frinkel.
    The girl, Jenny Grant, has hidden these tapes. She is afraid to do anything with them. She is terrified. She is afraid of Candella, who has picked her for one of his future stars. She can’t help picking up the Public Enemy broadcasts, and the unconscious suggestions in that are such as to turn the gangster, who is already bad enough, into a sort of monstrous and implacable figure of evil.
    When J. Marshall Sharry—the head of the company—finds that she knows where the tapes are, it becomes necessary to make her Candella’s new star—so that a pick-up can be turned to her mind, and the tapes found. The trouble is, that in her terror, she has forgotten the tapes entirely, so that even the machine can’t read the secret from her mind.
    Warneke, in the meantime, is finding out the truth, exploring the trap which he comes to realize is of his own making, looking for a way out. He comes across Hansen’s name—he has been aloof from politics before—finally gets in touch with Hansen, learns that the tapes exist and that they are a lever which might be used to topple the company political machine in the forthcoming election—the people will vote wisely, when they have been told the truth. The problem is to get the truth and get it told.
    Warneke learns the nature of his trap but fails to escape it. He is forced to enter the Public Enemy