There was a young fellow waiting beside Kane. A girl came down the sidewalk, pretty, long yellow hair and a well-filled blouse. Kane focused idly on her: yes, she had an apartment of her own, which she had carefully picked for a tolerant superintendent. Lechery jumped in the young man’s nerves. His eyes followed the girl, Cobean-style, and she walked on…simple harmonic motion.

Too bad. They could have enjoyed each other. Kane chuckled to himself. He had nothing against honest lust, anyhow not in his liberated conscious mind; he couldn’t do much about a degree of subconscious puritanism. Lord, you can’t be a telepath and remain any kind of prude. People’s lives were their own business, If they didn’t hurt anyone else too badly.

—the trouble is, he thought, they hurt me. but i can’t tell them that. they’d rip me apart and dance on the pieces. the government / the military / wouldn’t like a man to be alive who could read secrets but their fear-inspired anger would be like a baby’s tantrum beside the red blind amok of the common man (thoughtful husband considerate father good honest worker earnest patriot) whose inward sins were known. you can talk to a priest or a psychiatrist because it is only talk & he does not live your failings with you—

The light changed and Kane started across. It was clear fall weather, not that this area had marked seasons, a cool sunny day with a small wind blowing up the street from the water. A few blocks ahead of him, the University campus was a splash of manicured green under brown hills.

—flayed & burningburningburning moldering rotted flesh & the bones the white hard clean bones coming out gwtjklfmx—

Kane stopped dead. Through the vertigo he felt how sweat was drenching into his shirt.

And it was such an ordinary-looking man!

“Hey, there, buster, wake up! Ya wanna get killed?”

Kane took a sharp hold on himself and finished the walk across the street. There was a bench at the bus stop and he sat down till the trembling was over.

Some thoughts were unendurable.

He had a trick of recovery. He went back to Father Schliemann. The priest’s mind had been like a well, a deep well under sun-speckled trees, its surface brightened with a few gold-colored autumn leaves…but there was nothing bland about the water, it had a sharp mineral tang, a smell of the living earth. He had often fled to Father Schliemann, in those days of puberty when the telepathic power had first wakened in him. He had found good minds since then, happy minds, but never one so serene, none with so much strength under the gentleness.

“I don’t want you hanging around that papist, boy, do you understand?” It was his father, the lean implacable man who always wore a black tie. “Next thing you know, you’ll be worshiping graven images just like him.”

“But they aren’t—”

His ears could still ring with the cuff. “Go up to your room! I don’t want to see you till tomorrow morning. And you’ll have two more chapters of Deuteronomy memorized by then. Maybe that’ll teach you the true Christian faith.”