"I can see your Corps is going to be invaluable."
"Up to a point. Our job is to protect you: that's all we do. We're not spies or agents. We guard your life."
"What's been the ratio in the past?"
"The Corps came into existence a hundred and sixty years ago. Since then we've protected fifty-nine Quizmasters. Of that number we've been able to save eleven from the Challenge."
"How long did they last?"
"Some minutes, some years. Verrick lasted longest, although there was old McRae, back in 'seventy-eight, who ran his whole thirteen years. For him the Corps intercepted over three hundred Challengers."
"A telepathic Corps," Cartwright mused, "to protect me, public assassins to murder me."
"Only one assassin at a time. Of course, you could be murdered by an amateur unsanctioned by the Convention. Somebody with a grudge. But that's rare."
"Give me my length ratio."
"Average, two weeks."
Two weeks! And Verrick was shrewd. The Challenge Conventions wouldn't be sporadic affairs put together by isolated individuals hungry for power. Verrick would have everything organized. Efficient, concerted machinery turning out one assassin after another, creeping to Batavia until at last Leon Cartwright was destroyed.
"In your mind," Shaeffer said, "is an interesting vortex of the usual fear and a very unusual syndrome I can't analyze. Something about a ship."
"You're permitted to scan whenever you feel like it?"
"I can't help it. If I sat here talking you couldn't help hearing me. When I'm with a group their thoughts blur, like a party of people all babbling at once. But there's just you and me here."
"The ship is on its way," Cartwright said.
"It won't get far. The first planet it tries to squat, Mars or Jupiter or Ganymede——"