He felt water lapping at his ankles, and he hurried back toward the concrete breakwall. By the time he reached it, he was swimming. The wind had died away, but he shivered with the chill of the water that soaked his clothes.

He pulled himself up the face of the wall and lay on the ledge gasping for breath.

“May I help you?” he heard someone say.

A hand touched his shoulder. He looked up and saw a woman in a long beige duster coat. She was kneeling down, deeply concerned.

“I wasn’t trying to kill myself, “ he heard himself say.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I just thought you might need a hand up out of the water.”

“Yes,” he said, “I could use a hand.”

She helped him up. The headache seemed to be leaving him. He heard someone speak, far out on the river, and he looked at her. “Did you hear that?”

“Yes,” she said, “someone spoke. It must be one of those tricks of echo.”

“I’m sure that’s what it was,” he said.

“Do you need something to warm you up?” she asked. “I live right over there in that building. Some coffee?”

“Yes,” he said, allowing her to help him up the slope. “I need something to warm me up.”

Whatever you need in life you must go and get, had been the words from out there on the river where the lost bits of himself were doomed to sail forever. Damaged, forlorn; but no longer bound to him. He seemed to be able to see more clearly now.

And he went with her, for a while, for a long while or a short while; but he went to get something to warm him; he went to get what he needed.

The Executioner of the Malformed Children

D-12 IN BIN 39.

M-1 in Bin 85.

00-87 in Bin 506.

We stand here tonight paying our last respects to him. One of those who committed their bodies at birth to our defense. One of those who had no hope for the future, no hope for real or lasting joy; one of those who said, with every breath he ever drew, “I’ll stand between.” Of what use are words from me? Words, mere words, mean nothing. He served. Again: he served. And died for it. So we meet to pay last respects, to conduct a funeral for someone who denied himself all his life that we might live. What is there to say in behalf of someone like Alan Pryor that hasn’t been said of his like since the brave first died? What is there to say about an Alan Pryor that won’t sound stupid and mawkish and ridiculously melodramatic? He knew what lay ahead of him and not once, at no point of decision when he might have freely chosen to live like everyone else, did he turn away and give up the task of being paladin to us all. There aren’t enough thanks in the world for Alan Pryor. But still we meet here for this polite ceremony, and hope it will suffice. It won’t, of course, but we still hope.

L-4 in Bin 55.

He was seven years old when it really began for him. When he was born the hospital ran the tests required by the government security agency, and his dossier fiche had been flagged potential sensitive. But his mother and father had been horrified at the suggestion he be sold to the training school, and refused to release him. So the government had politely thanked them for their time, apologized for having inconvenienced them in any smallest way, and put Alan’s name in the wait file.

And when Alan reached age seven, things changed radically. His parents had come on hard times. What had been a promising career for Alan’s father had somehow, inexplicably, gone sour at every little juncture where it might have led to better things. There was no reason for it; not even Alan’s mother’s frequent paranoid delusions that the government was behind it made any sense. Things just went sour. And they were constantly pressed.

And he was seven years old when he had the accident.

On the school playground, positioned as far left seeker in a sandlot game of kinneys-and-trespass, he had not seen the great birdlike shadow that had swiftly fallen over him, and even as his friends had screamed look out, Al, one of those senseless freak accidents had occurred. The pak on a jitney had failed, the craft had fallen out of the sky, and crushed the child beneath its rotors at impact.

What a jitney was doing that far off the regular transit routes, at that odd hour, was never explained. But the passengers—a man and his wife from Topeka, Kansas—had been killed instantly, and Alan had been rushed to the hospital.

Lying cocooned in spinex preservative, Alan had never regained consciousness, His body was broken and irreparable. His parents came and stared through the spinex, seeing the lusterless bruise their child had become.

“Mrs. Pryor… Mr. Pryor…”

They turned at the soft voice behind them.

“Doctor,” Alan’s mother pleaded, “save him… isn’t there something you can do…” Then she looked back and added, very softly, “He’s so small…”

The doctor was a large man. Had he been rigged out in heavy wool, with a lumberjack waldo attached to his right arm, he would have seemed quite right in a logging camp. He put one great, thick arm around the woman’s shoulders and said (in the gentlest voice for such a huge man), “I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can.”

Alan’s father began to cry. Tight, dusty little sobs that failed to stir the air.

“There is one thing…”

Alan’s father was beyond hearing him, but she turned—still under his touch—and looked into his face for an answer from faraway.

“The people from the training school. They registered a call for him. If he lives. If you’ll grant permission.”

She stood without speaking for a moment, then lay her hand on her husband’s chest. His head came up and he stared at her. “Dennis, please.” He had not heard, so she had to tell him. And when he heard, he started to shake his head, but she grabbed his coat and her voice was desperate. “Dennis, I’m going to do it… the only way. They can save him. They have the skill to do it. I will!”

So the collection men came and took Alan Pryor away in aircars with shutters that had been opaqued. They took him to the Island, where the paladins were trained, and they saved his life. They did things to his body the Pryors’ doctor never knew could be done. They saved Alan Pryor’s life, and they saved that bright yellow spark in his mind that was the mark of the sensitive.

Alan’s parents never saw him again. But they had known it would turn out that way when they signed the release. It was better that he should live, even as a paladin, even if they never saw him again.

Alan’s mother waited for their life to improve quickly after the school received their boy. But it never did.

A-32 in Bin 11.

T-28 in Bin 277.

Alan Pryor was a sensitive. He had a power we still do not understand. All we can do is thank God that we were given such kinds of powerful talents when we needed them. Surely they are the most lonely figures on our green Earth, and if they were not here to save us, the Earth would have been lost long ago. No nonsensitive has ever seen the face of the menace that continues to threaten us. Only paladins like Alan Pryor have seen it, and they have never told us what it is like. Yet it exists. No one who has ever seen a blasted area, or lost a loved one when that terrible wind blows, could doubt that these guardians of our world stand at the edge of horror every moment of their lives. The way Alan Pryor died should be proof enough. T o those whose love of anarchy blinds them to such realities, to those who cry out for investigation of the paladins and the Island, we offer the example of Alan Pryor. and swear he shall not have died in vain.