He was turning away when his eye caught a figure sitting on a low knoll, scarcely discernible in the dim light. Lora! He caught his breath, watching, then realized it was not a girl at all, but a boy; he didn't know how the knowledge came. For an instant he remained absolutely motionless, staring into the gloom.

  "Hello."

  Selby was startled by the greeting, for the boy's back was to him.

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  "Hello," he answered, then felt an instant panic. The boy hadn't spoken! It had only seemed that way in his mind. And he hadn't answered, not with his voice. He had only thought the answer, the same as he had received it. The realization staggered him. That was...telepathy! He wanted to shout a denial.

  His thoughts raced as he moved forward. The boy must be Johnny Sloan.

  Had he, perhaps warned by Simon, spoken telepathically as a trap? It seemed scarcely plausible in one so young. And yet...

  The boy turned, looking up at him as he reached the knoll. Silently they regarded each other. He knows, Selby thought, and wondered why this time he felt no panic. At the same time he realized he was unable to decipher anything of the boy's thoughts, not even the formless impressions he so often got. But one thing he did know: behind that youthful face was knowledge.

  "I didn't expect to find anyone here," Selby said.

  "Not many people come," the boy answered gravely.

  "You're Johnny Sloan, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  Scrutinizing him, Selby was more certain than ever that the boy did know, but how much did he know? Impulsively he asked, "How did you know I was behind you?"

  "I felt you coming."

  "Felt?"

  "You can feel things too," the boy said.

  "Not very well, I'm afraid."

  "You could, if you wanted."

  "How do you know that?"

  "It's in your mind."

  "Telepathy?" Selby uttered the word slowly, watching the other's face.

  "Of course."

  Selby sat on the knoll beside him, wondering at the strangeness of the meeting. "I never really thought I was a telepath," he said finally.

  "Well, you're more of a transmitter."

  "Transmitter?" Selby sat straighter, trying to recall what he knew of the term.

  "Maybe you can't receive so well because you've never learned, but you sure can transmit,"

  Johnny insisted.

  Selby asked dubiously, "I can?"

  "Sure, loud and clear."

  "Can't all telepaths do that?"

  "Not like that," he denied. "Most of them have to be close, or know a person real well. A transmitter just puts himself into another person's mind.

  That's what Mr. Simon says."

  "Is that what I do?"

  The boy nodded and Selby looked at the river, considering the implications. If Johnny were right, his mind had been an open book to both

  Simon and Lora, or to any telepath in the area. Perhaps every thought he'd had since coming to Engo was known. He hadn't fooled anyone, not for a minute.

  "Perhaps that's not so good," he murmured.

  "It's real good," Johnny asserted. "Transmitters can even put their thoughts into people's minds when they don't want them."

  "You mean make them believe something they don't want to believe."

  "Mr. Simon says good transmitters can."

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  "And I'm a good transmitter?"

  "Real good," the boy answered.

  "Most people are afraid to talk about it," he observed.

  "Not here, Mr. Selby."

  Selby glanced up sharply. "Did that come from my mind, too -- my name?"

  The boy nodded and he went on, "Then you must know who I am, where I'm from?"

  He made it a question.

  "Yes," Johnny answered simply.

  "You're not afraid?"

  "You're all right."

  "How do you know that?"

  "From your mind, Mr. Selby."

  "You were David's friend, weren't you?"

  "Davie died," Johnny said, "but you know that."

  "I'm sorry," Selby said. "Where did he live?"

  "Over toward the hills." He gestured vaguely toward a wooded rise beyond the cemetery.

  "I hear his sister is taking care of you. Did she mention that she met me?" The boy nodded without answering and Selby felt disappointed. When the silence continued, he asked, "Was it true that David could make sticks float in the air?"

  "Sticks, rocks, dogs -- almost anything," Johnny replied.

  "Did he do it often?"

  Johnny shook his head. "No, only at times. It's a lot of work."

  "Work?"

  "Concentrating," he explained.

  Selby said slowly, "I've never heard of anyone else who could do that.

  Have you?"

  Johnny gazed silently at him. "No," he said finally, "I never have."

  "I wouldn't mention it, if anyone asks."

  "I won't, Mr. Selby."

  "It's dangerous," he said, trying to push the point home.

  Johnny nodded gravely. "I know that."

  In the silence that followed, Selby felt a doubt nibble at his mind. The boy was Johnny Sloan.

  Aside from his admission, there was no mistaking the physical description. Yet Hallam Vogel had described Johnny as not overly bright and minimally telepathic. This boy didn't fit that description at all.

  Could Vogel have been mistaken? It seemed highly doubtful.

  He glanced at the boy again. Although he was no judge of telepathic capability, he knew this boy was bright. It was there in his voice, his manner, in the knowledge that lay deep behind those youthful eyes. And in his insight. Something was terribly wrong, but what?

  He started to ask another question when the boy suddenly cocked his head in a listening attitude, then leaped to his feet. "I have to go, Mr. Selby."

  He darted away before Selby could utter a word, vanishing among the trees. Selby started as a huge form leaped from the deep bulla grass a few yards away and bounded after him.

  He wasn't certain, but in the dim light of the quarter moon it appeared like a shaggy yellow dog.

  Six

  ALEK SELBY was nine years old when an event occurred which was to have a profound effect on all the remaining years of his life. Later, he looked back on it with emotions compounded of fear, excitement, doubt, and wonder; but no word of it escaped his lips for many years to come.

  The danger was too great.

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  On the day of the "happening" -- as he came to think of it -- he was at the space terminal in Mekla with two friends, watching the passengers stream aboard a great starliner. Altair Queen --

  the name was emblazoned in silver on the dark bow which he knew formed the navigation bridge.

  Small orbital ferries buzzed like hopper insects in the background, and freighters plied their trade with monotonous regularity, their hulls crusted and scarred from strange planetary surfaces. But the starliner was the one to watch. Sleek and proud, it looked like what it was -- a ship that girded the galaxy.

  "Its first stop's in the Mirach system," Alek said importantly. He knew because his father had told him. Someday he would go to the Mirach system too, he promised himself, and to Algol, Vega, Mizar, Sol, and a hundred other star systems he could name. He'd always come back to Amador, of course. Basking in the yellow-white sun of Altair, it was the most beautiful planet in the

  Federation, his father assured him.

  He added musingly, "But each man thinks his own planet best."

  The last passengers were boarding the A hair Queen when Alek's name screamed in his mind.

  "Alek! Alek!" His mother's stricken cry came to him with numbing shock and he jerked upright, his heart hammering, cold with the knowledge that some terrible thing had happened. What thing? He felt the cold clutch of fear, then the call came again and jolted him to action.

  "Gotta go," he yelled. Before his companions could answer, he turned and sped away, cutting across the broad avenues toward his home. He ran, fighting the fear that numbed his mind. The call! His mother couldn't have called, not over the dozen avenues that lay between his home and the spaceport. But she had, and he'd heard her! And the despair! Driven by a nameless dread, his legs pumped faster as he came within view of the towering apartment where he lived.

  His mother looked up from the couch when he entered, her eyes glazed.

  "Your father's dead," she said dully.

  "Dead?" He stared at her, feeling an awful emptiness.

  "The Aragon has been destroyed."

  "How do you know?" he asked desperately. Despite the certainty behind her words, he felt a touch of wonder. The Aragon, on which his father was chief astrogator, was presently somewhere in the Fomalhaut system, wouldn't be back for weeks.

  "I know," she whispered. Then she put her face in her hands and wept.

  The news was made public a week later: the Aragon, out of Amador, had vanished in space shortly after lift-off from Gull, second planet of the white sun Fomalhaut. A single distress call had been received shortly before it was due to enter the time stream; and then silence.

  How had his mother known? He was afraid to ask. More fearful, how had he heard her?

  Thinking of it, he realized there had been other occasions when things "just came to mind," but never so clearly as the last time. Usually they were scarcely more than impressions, quite vaguely defined; but his mother's call had come sharp and clear, even to the tone of her anguish. But how had she heard?

  He pondered that often and long during the grief-stricken days that followed, sensing that it was something he shouldn't talk about. Occasionally, as in a nightmare, he thought that it had never happened, that it was just his imagination. Yet he knew it wasn't. In the end, he pushed it from his mind, yet the questions remained, deep in his subconscious: How had she known? How had he heard her?

  Later, when his mother had partially recovered from her grief, she called him to her and asked,

  "Why did you come running home that day?"

  "I heard you call." He looked wonderingly at her.

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  "Heard me?" A frightened look came into her face.

  "I was at the space terminal watching the Altair Queen," he explained.

  "And you heard me?" she whispered.

  "My name -- you called my name," he answered. "I knew something was wrong."

  Then she gathered him in, holding him tight. "Don't ever tell anyone that," she said, in a scarcely audible voice. "It's dangerous, dangerous..."

  "Like...you knowing?"

  "Yes." Her answer came in a hushed voice. "Don't ever tell anyone, Alek."

  "I won't," he promised. He felt something of her fear.

  They never spoke of it again, but it lay like a dark secret between them for the short time she had to live. At times he awoke in the night, suddenly and without reason, feeling his heart beat and his hands perspiring. He would be standing again at the space terminal watching the Altair Queen while the call, "Alek, Alek," drummed through his mind. Then the question would rush back: How had he heard her? No answer came; he had just heard.

  Following his father's death, his mother withdrew from the world, suddenly wan and thin, her cheeks hollowed, and within a few months she died.

  Alek went to live with his aunt and uncle, who was a minor government official with SocAd.

  After a while his life was almost normal again. But he never forgot his mother, or the tall, spare man who had vanished with the Aragon, and who no more would tell him of the distant ports of space.

  Alek Selby was seventeen when he entered the College of Public Administration on a scholarship earned through his exceptionally high grades.

  It was a distinct honor, he knew, and one that brought him much envy, for his future career was assured. Graduates automatically went into public service, and almost as automatically climbed through the ranks to positions of prestige and power.

  "You form a select group," the professor said, on the first day of class. Alek had taken the tribute as a reference to the high scholarship standards necessary to gain admission to the college, but later learned the words meant something more. Scholarship was but one facet; beyond that were the seemingly innocuous tests which had screened students deemed exceptionally high in leadership, loyalty, and the implicit belief that the great mass of people were to be governed, but that only a select few should govern. Alek didn't believe that, but he answered the questions the way he thought they should be answered.

  As time went on, he learned more of his own future. The power structure into which he would fit was simple. The Imperator, elected every ten years by the High Council from among its own members, was the Federation's undisputed leader. Each council member represented one of the Federation's ten sectors.

  Governmental areas within each sector were apportioned among nine administrations, each headed by a director. Although a sector government required tens of millions of people, the top positions were reserved for those who came up through the College of Public Administration.

  At times Alek felt twinges of guilt. Not that he considered himself less smart than his fellow students, but he often found that he knew answers almost before the questions were asked.

  Although he never heard words (not like the cry "Alek! Alek!" that had rung so clearly in his mind so many years before), he did receive impressions that guided him through his tests and verbal exchanges. At times they were almost overpowering. He thought of them as

  "hunches," yet remembered his mother's advice, and never spoke of them.

  In Psy One, Alek learned that telepathy was a mutant trait, threatening to the public welfare because it violated the rights of privacy guaranteed each citizen. Accordingly, following enactment of Public Law 2435-T2-M, each sector set aside a planet on which telepaths "could enjoy their liberty and pursuit of life unhampered by others." In the case of his own sector, the Page 36

  planet was Engo, which turned about the Giza sun.

  Soon afterward Alek had a frightening experience. Driven by a curiosity to know more about telepathy, he went to the main library and looked up the subject in the file. To his astonishment, there were scores of references in tape, film, and book form.

  Jotting down some notes, he started toward the books. He'd scarcely reached them when an elderly man brushed past him. "Stay away from them; get out of here, quick," he murmured.

  Alek turned, but the man was already gone, moving down between the stacks. He started to turn back when he glimpsed a second man watching him from the other end of the row. Alek felt a sudden fright and started to tremble, at the same time aware of an alarm sounding loudly in his brain. He started toward the main entrance, walking faster as he drew near it.

  "Wait, boy!" The shout came from behind him and he broke into a run, darting through the doorway. In another moment he was swallowed by the crowds.

  He never forgot the occasion. Later, he learned that the "searchers," a special branch of police assigned to mutant activities, kept watch on that section of the library as a means of detecting young telepaths; the tapes, film and books, in fact, were kept there for that purpose.

  Who was the man who had warned him? He never learned.

  Five years later, in Psy Four (restricted to those selected for service with the Social Administration), he learned of the theoretical possibility of the beyond, a form of mutation which manifested itself in clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, teleportation, and other phenomena contrary to the laws of psychic mechanics.

  "Alek! Alek!" The memory of the scream in his mind came back as he learned of this new kind of paranormal. Had his mother been clairvoyant? Was he a telepath? No, he denied fiercely. He had never read minds, couldn't. The formless impressions he received simply were intuition.

  (But it wasn't true;

  he knew it.)

  Following graduation, Alek moved along a predestined course that took him step by step through the maze that constituted SocAd, the Social

  Administration. Inasmuch as Sector Three's nearly three hundred planets were spread throughout a hundred star systems, he found himself going to many of the worlds of which he once had dreamed.

  For several years he was moved from planet to planet in seemingly random fashion until he had the entire operation at his fingertips. His work was good; he knew it. The same sense that had served him in school served him now,

  only better. Although his awareness of others increased, at times uncomfortably so, the thing that lay within his own mind baffled him more than ever.

  Following a brief tour as regional head for the three planets of the sun Blenda, he was recalled to Amador and appointed principal investigator on the staff of Sector Director Korl Smithson.

  Alek had but one bad moment. That was when he found he had to submit to a probe of his psyche and emotional stability as prerequisite to the job.

  "Relax, relax..." For months afterward he felt the dread as he lay on the couch under the soft light, listening to Psymaster Hallam Vogel's calming voice as he fell into the oblivion of deep sleep.

  His first question on waking had been propelled by a terrible fear: "How did I do?"

  "Fine," the psymaster answered, "you're as stable as they come."

  Despite the psymaster's assurance, Selby never quite managed to rid himself of the fear. Was he a telepath? He didn't know, never knew until that day over five years later when a boy on a remote planet thought "Hello," and he had answered.

  And strangely, when he knew, the terror that had followed him throughout all the years Page 37

  vanished.

  Awakened to the sound of shouts and scurrying feet, Selby bolted upright in his bunk and swung his feet to the floor. Reaching for his clothes, he felt his heart beginning to pound.

  "Close the hatches!" Cromwell's thin, piping voice came over the speakers, high with excitement.

  Close the hatches! Selby realized that for whatever reason, the captain was rushing to get the Cosmic Wind into space.

  Dressing hurriedly, he emerged from his cabin as Grimpy turned into the corridor. Selby caught his arm.

 

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