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—