That wasn’t Nepal, present time. Not even a country as isolated and mountainous as hers could be so primitive. Feudal customs ? Magic ? Magic?

He had sat up and thumbed the switch of the bedside intercom before he realized it. Waiting for an answer, he probed deeper into the extraordinary images echoing up to him. A sense of dependence and absolute mastery; a mood of defiant arrogance. Those weren’t from the girl. And least characteristic of all was the feeling of masculinity colouring the thoughts. Like most people from a peasant background, she had rigid preconceptions of masculinity and femininity; she had conformed religiously to the social pattern at home in order to evade the worst consequences of her budding talent.

A tired voice spoke from the intercom. “Schacht here—duty doctor. What is it ?”

“It’s Gerry, Ludwig. Something’s wrong with the Nepalese girl in Ward Four — something bad enough to waken me.”

“Hmmm?” A wordless question as Schacht scanned the Ward Four tell-tale board. “I have nothing here from her. According to the tell-tales she’s asleep.”

“It’s not original with her,” Howson said. He was sweating; there was tremendous depth and complexity in the mental background of what he was picking up, and the more he groped into it the less sure he became of his ready-made explanations. Still, he had no better suggestion.

“Have we any male Chinese paranoids under therapy?”

“Yes — there’s one undergoing coma and regression in the same wing as the girl.” Schacht hesitated. “Not original with her, you said. Do you mean she’s picking up the thoughts of an insane mind?”

“She’s picking up somebody, and it’s scaring hell out of her. Check the paranoid you mentioned. It might be him. He heard the doubt in his high-pitched voice.

“The chemotherapy tell-tales are blank too. I thought the ego was completely masked in coma — out of reach.”

“Maybe the depressant supply broke down. Check him anyway.”

A pause. The impression of a shrug. “Very well. But if it isn’t the Chinese paranoid, are you sure it can’t be the girl herself?”

“Certain,” Howson declared. “Hurry, Ludwig — please !”

“Gerry ? He’s totally unconscious. Are you sure it’s not the girl herself — a schizoid secondary, maybe ?”

Howson repressed an impulse to snap at him. He was sure, but he couldn’t demonstrate why, using words. “Hang on,” he said resignedly. So much for his chance of a night’s unbroken rest!

He touched the control that moved the headboard of the bed into position as a contoured support for his deformed spine, and leaned back against its padding, staring into darkness.

First he would have to sort out from the inchoate succession of telepathic concepts some more clues than he had. Masculinity, Asian nationality, and enjoyment of power were hardly unique characteristics on this densely populated side of the planet. He surveyed the deeper levels cautiously. At least, he told himself, this didn’t feel like the emanation of a sick mind. It wasn’t even as irrational as most otherwise sane people became when they slept.

No: wait a moment. That must be wrong. He caught himself with a start. Hadn’t there been referents in the very first contact which he’d defined reflexively as magic ?

Growing more puzzled every second, he examined it closer. No good. It was blurred by the girl’s incomprehension, and probably made unrecognizable. He’d have to look for the original source. In one way it shouldn’t be too difficult — to reach into the awareness of a sleeping novice the signal must be both close and powerful. But in another way the task was immense. “Close” could mean anywhere in the city, and there were a million-odd inhabitants.

“Gerry? You there?” Schacht demanded over the intercom.

“Shut up,” Howson told him. “This feels big, Ludwig. Big — and bad.”

He sensed Schacht’s unspoken disbelief, and ignored it. Schacht at least made an attempt to master his instinctual revulsion against telepathists, and that was more than some people bothered to do.

He let his mind rove out over the night city, where a million brains made dreams sigh like the wind between tall white towers, down wide, straight streets. That was a cosmopolitan consciousness, stranded together from all over the world and sometimes from farther away still — from the Moon, or Mars…

He had rationalized his unwillingness to travel. Why go, when it all came to him ? In this man’s mind, a desert remembered; in that man’s, a jungle; in another’s, naked space, hurtful with stars sharp as knives.

But it wasn’t a good rationalization. To live vicariously was to be a parasite, and even a symbiote could have little self-respect.

He jerked his train of thought back under control. He had had barely an hour’s sleep before he was woken, and he felt extremely tired. None the less, he’d have to finish what he’d started before he could sleep again.

And all at once he had it.

“Got anything yet?” Schacht said with growing impatience, Howson barely heard the words; he was too depressed at the realization of what was happening.

“Gerry!”

“I’m — I’m listening, Ludwig,” Howson forced out. “You’d better call Pan and get him to come up here, and Deirdre too. And call an ambulance, and a car.”

“What on earth have you found, then ?”

“There’s another catapathic grouping been set up. It’s out in the city somewhere — I guess I can track it down.” Images of absolute power, over natural law as well as men’s minds, thrust the words down to second place in Howson’s attention.

“Oh, marvellous!” Schacht said bitterly. “This is really my night! I’ve had two knife-wounds, three burns, a car accident and two premature labours since I came on duty !”

Howson paid no attention. He was reeling under the violence of the events that were storming into his mind. Lacking any connexion with external reality, yet charged with the full force of consciousness — as dreams, though equally illogical, never were — they gave him no fulcrum and no purchase. When he had viewed them through the intermediary mind of the Nepalese girl (who must have a sleeping-pill to save her from this bombardment, he remembered dazedly), he hadn’t realized the power driving them. And worse, there was this aura of perfect calm tinged with — with amusement…

He exerted every ounce of will-power and withdrew from contact, trembling. He had driven his nails deep into his palms. Why should that surprise him? This was what he feared most in all the world.

He spoke, both aloud and mentally, to the unknown telepathist, putting all his hate and anger into a single concept: Damn you, whoever you are!

Secure in fugue, pursuing a gaudy fantasy for his own private reasons, the unknown might have sensed the signal and chuckled, inviting Howson to lay siege if he wished to the fortress of his brain… or the idea might have been Howson’s own. He was too upset to tell which.

Agonized, he faced the inevitable future. No projective telepathist was worthless, and going by his current signals this man was exceptional among exceptions. What intolerable strain had forced him to abandon reality didn’t matter; they would want him dragged back. They would call on Howson, and because this was what he did best in the world he would attempt it, and be sublimely terrified, and maybe, this time, find that—

no.

The order was to himself, but it was given as a deafening telepathic scream, and elsewhere in the hospital other telepathists, including the Nepalese girl, reacted with sleepy surprise. Blindly he reached to the shelf beside the bed where he kept his stock of medicaments — he was prey to as many emergencies as any patient in the place — and found the tranquillizer bottle. He gulped two of the pills down, and sat rock-still while they straitjacketed his writhing mind.