And what of it? This assistant professor was a good man, a kindly and honest man, his inwardness ought to be between him and the Recording Angel. Few of his thoughts had ever become deeds, or ever would. Let him bury them himself, let him be alone with them. Kane ceased focusing on him.

  The telepath had grown tolerant. He expected little of anyone; nobody matched the mask except possibly Father Schliemann and a few others…and those were human too, with human failings; the difference was that they knew peace. It was the emotional overtones of guilt which made Kane wince. God knew he himself was no better. Worse maybe, but then his life had thrust him to it. If you had an ordinary human sex drive, for instance, but could not endure to cohabit with the thoughts of a woman, your life became one of fleeting encounters; there was no help for it, even if your austere boyhood training still protested.

  “Pardon me, got a match?”

  —lynn is dead  /  i still can’t understand it that i will never see her again & eventually you learn how to go on in a chopped-off fashion but what do you do in the meantime how do you get through the nights alone—

  “Sure.” —maybe that is the worst: sharing sorrow and unable to help & only able to give him a light for his cigarette—

  Kane put the matches back in his pocket and went on up University, pausing again at Oxford. A pair of large campus buildings jutted up to the left; others were visible ahead and to the right, through a screen of eucalyptus trees. Sunlight and shadow damascened the grass. From a passing student’s mind he discovered where the library was. A good big library—perhaps it held a clue, buried somewhere in the periodical files. He had already arranged for permission to use the facilities: prominent young author doing research for his next novel.

  Crossing wistfully named Oxford Street, Kane smiled to himself. Writing was really the only possible occupation: he could live in the country and be remote from the jammed urgency of his fellow men. And with such an understanding of the soul as was his, with any five minutes on a corner giving him a dozen stories, he made good money at it. The only drawback was the trouble of avoiding publicity, editorial summonses to New York, autographing parties, literary teas…he didn’t like those. But you could remain faceless if you insisted.

  They said nobody but his agent knew who B. Traven was. It had occurred, wildly, to Kane that Traven might be another like himself. He had gone on a long journey to find out…No. He was alone on earth, a singular and solitary mutant, except for—

  It shivered in him, again he sat on the train. It had been three years ago, he was in the club car having a nightcap while the streamliner ran eastward through the Wyoming darkness. They passed a westbound train, not so elegant a one. His drink leaped from his hand to the floor and he sat for a moment in stinging blindness. That flicker of thought, brushing his mind and coming aflame with recognition and then borne away again…Damn it, damn it, he should have pulled the emergency cord and so should she. There should have halted both trains and stumbled through cinders and sagebrush and found each other’s arms.

  Too late. Three years yielded only a further emptiness. Somewhere in the land there was, or there had been, a young woman, and she was a telepath and the startled touch of her mind had been gentle. There had not been time to learn anything else. Since then he had given up on private detectives. (How could you tell them: “I’m looking for a girl who was on such-and-such a train the night of—”?) Personal ads in all the major papers had brought him nothing but a few crank letters. Probably she didn’t read the personals; he’d never done so till his search began, there was too much unhappiness to be found in them if you understood humankind as well as he did.

  Maybe this library here, some unnoticed item…but if there are two points in a finite space and one moves about so as to pass through every infinitesimal volume dV, it will encounter the other one in finite time provided that the other point is not moving too.

  Kane shrugged and went along the curving way to the gatehouse. It was slightly uphill. There was a bored cop in the shelter, to make sure that only authorized cars were parked on campus. The progress paradox: a ton or so of steel, burning irreplaceable petroleum to shift one or two human bodies around, and doing the job so well that it becomes universal and chokes the cities which spawned it. A telepathic society would be more rational. When every little wound in the child’s soul could be felt and healed…when the thick burden of guilt was laid down, because everyone knew that everyone else had done the same…when men could not kill because soldier and murderer felt the victim die…

  —adam & eve? you can’t breed a healthy race out of two people. but if we had telepathic children  /  & we would be bound to do so i think because the mutation is obviously recessive /  then we could study the heredity of it & the gift would be passed on to other blood-lines in logical distribution & every generation there would be more of our kind until we could come out openly & even the mindmates could be helped by our psychiatrists & priests & earth would be fair and clean and sane—

  There were students sitting on the grass, walking under the Portland Cement Romanesque of the buildings, calling and laughing and talking. The day was near an end. Now there would be dinner, a date, a show, maybe some beer at Robbie’s or a drive up into the hills to neck and watch the lights below like trapped stars and the mighty constellation of the Bay Bridge…or perhaps, with a face-saving grumble about mid-terms, an evening of books, a world suddenly opened. It must be good to be young and mindmute. A dog trotted down the walk and Kane relaxed into the simple wordless pleasure of being a healthy and admired collie.

  —so perhaps it is better to be a dog than a man? no  /  surely not / for if a man knows more grief he also knows more joy & so it is to be a telepath: more easily hurt yes but  /  god  /  think of the mindmutes always locked away in aloneness and think of sharing not only a kiss but a soul with your beloved—

  The uphill trend grew steeper as he approached the library, but Kane was in fair shape and rather enjoyed the extra effort. At the foot of the stairs he paused for a quick cigarette before entering. A passing woman flicked eyes across him and he learned that he could also smoke in the lobby. Mind reading had its everyday uses. But it was good to stand here in the sunlight. He stretched, reaching out physically and mentally.

  —let’s see now the integral of log x dx well make a substitution suppose we call y equal to log x then this is interesting i wonder who wrote that line about euclid has looked on beauty bare—

  Kane’s cigarette fell from his mouth.

  It seemed that the wild hammering of his heart must drown out the double thought that rivered in his brain, the thought of a physics student, a very ordinary young man save that he was quite wrapped up in the primitive satisfaction of hounding down a problem, and the other thought, the one that was listening in.

  —she—

  He stood with closed eyes, away on his feet, breathing as if he ran up a mountain. —are You there? are You there?

  —not daring to believe: what do i feel?—

  —i was the man on the train—

  —& i was the woman—

  A shuddering togetherness.

  “Hey! Hey, mister, is anything wrong?”

  Almost Kane snarled. Her thought was so remote, on the very rim of indetectability, he could get nothing but subvocalized words, nothing of the self, and this busybody— “No, thank, I’m OK, just a, a little winded.” —where are You, where can i find You o my darling?—

  —image of a large white building  /  right over here & they call it dwinelle hall & i am sitting on the bench outside & please come quickly please be here i never thought this could become real—

  Kane broke into a run. For the first time in fifteen years, he was unaware of his human surroundings. There were startled looks, he didn’t see them, he was running to her and she was running too.

  —my name is norman kane & i was not born to that name but took it from people who adopted me because i fled my father (horrible how mother died in darkness & he would not let her have drugs though it was cancer & he said drugs were sinful and pain was good for the soul & he really honestly believed that) & when the power first appeared i made slips and he beat me and said it was witchcraft & i have searched all my life since & i am a writer but only because i must live but it was not aliveness until this moment—

  —o my poor kicked beloved  /  i had it better /  in me the power grew more slowly and i learned to cover it & i am twenty years old & came here to study but what are books at this moment—

  He could see her now. She was not conventionally beautiful, but neither was she ugly, and there was kindness in her eyes and on her mouth.

  —what shall i call you? to me you will always be You but there must be a name for the mindmutes & i have a place in the country among old trees & such few people as live nearby are good folk /  as good as life will allow them to be—

  —then let me come there with you & never leave again—

  They reached each other and stood a foot apart. There was no need for a kiss or even a handclasp…not yet. It was the minds which leaped out and enfolded and became one.

  —i remember that at the age of three i drank out of the toilet bowl  /  there was a peculiar fascination to it & i used to steal loose change from my mother though she had little enough to call her own so i could sneak down to the drugstore for ice cream & i squirmed out of the draft & these are the dirty episodes involving women—

  —as a child i was not fond of my grandmother though she loved me and once i played the following fiendish trick on her & at the age of sixteen i made an utter fool of myself in the following manner & i have been physically chaste chiefly because of fear but my vicarious experiences are numbered in the thousands—

  Eyes watched eyes with horror.

  —it is not that you have sinned for i know everyone has done the same or similar things or would if they had our gift & i know too that it is nothing serious or abnormal & of course you have decent instincts & are ashamed—

  —just so  /  it is that you know what i have done & you know every last little wish & thought & buried uncleanness & in the top of my head i know it doesn’t mean anything but down underneath is all which was drilled into me when i was just a baby & i will not admit to anyone else that such things exist in me—

  A car whispered by, homeward bound. The trees talked in the light sunny wind.

  A boy and girl went hand in hand.

  The thought hung cold under the sky, a single thought in two minds.

  —get out. i hate your bloody guts.—

  Heinlein’s Stories

  Far-faring, star-faring,

  Robert A. Heinlein, sir,

  Please tell more stories of

  Men who are strong

  And of those well-endowed,

  Ultradesirable

  Women—the kind who make

  Lazarus Long.

  Logic

  Brother bringeth

  brother his bane,

  and sons of sisters

  break kinship’s bonds.

  Never a man

  spareth another.

  Hard is the world.

  Whoredom prevaileth.

  Axe-time, sword-time,

  —shields are cloven—

  wind-time and wolf-time,

  ere the world waneth.

  —Elder Edda

  He was nearly always alone, and even when others were near him, even when he was speaking with them, he seemed to be standing on the far side of an unbridgeable gulf. His only companion was a gaunt gray mongrel with a curiously shaped head and a savage disposition, and the two had traveled far over the empty countryside, the rolling plains and straggling woods and high bluffs several miles down the river. They were an uncanny sight, walking along a ridge against the blood-flaring sunset, the thin, ragged, big-headed boy, like a dwarf from the legends of an irretrievable past, and the shaggy, lumpish animal skulking at his heels.

  Roderick Wayne saw them thus as he walked home along the river. They were trotting rapidly along the other side. He hailed them, and they stopped, and the boy stared curiously, almost wonderingly. Wayne knew that attitude, though Alaric was only a grotesque outline against the fantastically red sky. He knew that his son was looking and looking at him, as if trying to focus, as if trying to remember who the—stranger—was. And the old pain lay deep in him, though he called out loudly enough: “Come on over, Al!”

  Wayne had had a hard day’s work in the shop, and he was tired. Fixing machinery was a long jump down from teaching mathematics in Southvale College, but the whole world had fallen and men survived as best they could in its ruins. He was better off than most—couldn’t complain.

  Of old he had been wont to stroll along the river that traversed the campus, each evening after classes, smoking his pipe and swinging his cane, thinking perhaps of what Karen would have for supper or of the stark impersonal beauty of the latest development in quantum mechanics—two topics not as unrelated as one might suppose. The quiet summer evenings were not to be spent in worry or petty plans for the next day, there was always too much time for that. He simply walked along in his loose-jointed way, breathing tobacco smoke and the cool still air, watching the tall old trees mirror themselves in the river or the molten gold and copper of sunset. There would be a few students on the broad smooth lawns who would hail him in a friendly way, for Bugsy Wayne was well liked; otherwise only the river and himself and the evening star.

  But that was sixteen or more years ago, and his memories of that time were dim by now, blurred in a tidal wave of savage, resistless events. The brief, the incredible nightmare of a war that wiped out every important city in the world in a couple of months—its protracted aftermath of disease, starvation, battle, work, woe, and the twisting of human destiny—it covered those earlier experiences, distorted them like rocks seen through a flowing stream. Now the campus stood in ruinous desolation, cattle staked out in the long grass, crumbling empty buildings staring with blind eyes at the shards of civilization.

  After the cities went, and the deliberately spread diseases and blights shattered the world’s culture into fratricidal savages fighting for the scraps, there was no more need of professors but a desperate shortage of mechanics and technicians. Southvale, by-passed by war, a college town in the agricultural Midwest, drew into itself a tight communistic dictatorship defending what it had with blood and death. It was cruel, that no-admission policy. There had been open battles with wandering starvelings. But the plagues were kept out, and they had saved enough food for most of them to survive even that first terrible winter after the war-strewn blights and insects had devoured the crops. But farm machinery had to be kept going. It had to be converted to horse, ox, and human power when gasoline gave out. So Wayne was assigned to the machine shop and, somewhat to his own surprise, turned out to be an excellent technician. His talents for robbing now useless tractors and automobiles in search of spare parts for the literally priceless food machines got his nickname changed to Cannibal, and he rose to general superintendent.

  That was a long time ago, and conditions had improved since. The dictatorship was relaxed now, but Southvale still didn’t need professors, and it had enough elementary teachers for its waning child population. So Wayne was still machine shop boss. In spite of which, he was only a very tired man in patched and greasy overalls, going home to supper, and his thoughts darkened as he saw his child.

  Alaric Wayne crossed the ruinous bridge a few yards upriver and joined his father. They were an odd contrast, the man tall and stooped with grayed hair and a long, lined face; the boy small for his fourteen years, lean and ragged, his frail-looking body too short for his long legs, his head too big for both. Under ruffled brown hair his face was thin, almost intense in its straight-lined, delicately cut pensiveness, but his huge light-blue eyes were vacant and unfocused.

  “Where’ve you been all day, son?” asked Wayne. He didn’t really expect an answer, and got none. Alaric rarely spoke, didn’t even seem to hear most questions. He was looking blankly ahead now, like a blind creature, but for all his gawky appearance moved with a certain grace.

  Wayne’s glance held only pity, his mind only an infinite weariness. And this is the future. The war, loading air and earth with radioactive colloids, dust, which won’t burn out for a century. Not enough radioactivity to be lethal to any but highly susceptible individuals—but enough to saturate our organisms and environment, enough to start an explosion of mutations in every living creature. This was man’s decision, to sell his birthright, his racial existence, for the sovereign prerogatives of nations existing today only in name and memory. And what will come of it, nobody can know.

  They walked up a hill and onto the street. Grass had grown between paving blocks, and tumbledown houses stood vacantly in weed-covered lots. A little farther on, though, they came into the district still inhabited. The population had fallen to about half the prewar, through privation and battle as well as causes which had once been more usual. At first glance, Southvale had a human, almost medieval look. A horse-drawn wagon creaked by. Folk went down toward the market place in rude homespun clothes, carrying torches and clumsy lanterns. Candlelight shone warmly through the windows of tenanted houses.

  Then one saw the dogs and horses and cattle more closely—and the children. And knew what an irrevocable step had been taken, knew that man would, in a racial sense, no longer be human.

  A small pack of grimy urchins raced by, normal by the old standards, normal too in their shouting spite: “Mutie! Mutie! Yaaah, mutant!” Alaric did not seem to notice them, but his dog bristled and growled. In the dusk the animal’s high round head, hardly canine, seemed demoniac, and his eyes gleamed red.