“Hey — I think I seen you around here some place, a long time back. Didn’t I?”

He would have been about twelve when Howson left, probably; it was quite possible he remembered. “You might have,” Howson agreed cautiously. “Does Charlie Birberger still run this place?”

“Mm-hm. You a friend of his ?”

“I used to be,” Howson hesitated. “If he’s in, maybe he’d come and have a word with me.”

“I’ll ask,” said the counterhand obligingly.

There was an exchange of shouts; then Birberger himself, older, fatter, but otherwise unchanged, came blinking into the bar. He caught sight of Howson and stopped dead, his mind a kaleidoscope of astonishment.

He recovered quickly, and waddled across the floor with a jovial air. “By God! Sarah Howson’s boy! Well, I never expected to see you in this place again after all we heard about you! Making out pretty well, hey ?”

“Pretty well,” Howson said. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Uh? Oh, sure!” Birberger fumbled a chair away from the table and entrusted his bulk to it gingerly. He put both elbows on the table, leaning forward. “We see about you in the papers sometimes, y’know! Must be wonderful work you’re doing Must admit, I never expected you’d wind up where you are Uh — been a pretty long time since you were in here, hey ? Ten years!”

“Eleven,” said Howson quietly.

“Long as that? Well, well!” Birberger rambled on. There was a faint quaver in his rotund voice, and Howson was suddenly struck by a strange realization: damn it, the man’s scared !

“Uh — any special reason for coming back?” Birberger probed clumsily. “Or just looking up the old place?”

“Looking up old friends, more,” Howson corrected. He took a sip of his beer. “You’re the first I’ve met since I flew in an hour or two back.”

“Well, it’s good of you to count me as an old friend,” Birberger said, brightening. “Y’know, I often think of the days when I useta let you help out in here. I remember you had quite an appetite for a—” He might have been going to say “runt’, but caught himself and finished with a change of mental gears: “Uh — young fella !”

He sat back. “Y’know, I like to think maybe I managed to give you a helping hand now and again. With your mother sick, and all…”

Howson could see the rose-coloured filters going up in his memory. He hid a smile. Charlie Birberger had been an irritable, hard-to-geton-with employer, given to bawling out his assistants mercilessly — especially Gerry Howson.

Well, no matter. He nodded as though in agreement, and Birberger’s original disquiet faded still further.

“Hey, tell you something!” the fat man said. “I still have all the cuttings from the papers about how they found you. I guess I could dig them out and show you. Hang on !”

He hoisted himself to his feet and disappeared into the back rooms. In a few minutes he returned with a dusty album, which he made ineffectual attempts to blow clean as he sat down again.

“There !” he said, opening it and turning it so that Howson could read the yellowed cuttings it contained.

Howson laid down his knife and fork and leafed through the album curiously. He hadn’t realized that the discovery of a telepathist had created such a furore in the city. Here were front-page items from all the leading local papers, some of them with pictures of Danny Waldemar and other UN personnel.

He had come to the last page and was about to hand the book back with a word of thanks, when he checked. The final item seemed to be completely irrelevant; it was a single paragraph reporting the marriage of Miss Mary Hall and Mr Stephen Williams, and the date was about two years after his departure.

“This one,” he said, putting a finger on it. “Is it connected with the rest?”

Birberger craned to study it. He frowned. “Now what in—? If it’s there, sure as hell there’s a reason. Must have something to do with — Good God, I remember!” He stared in astonishment at Howson. “Don’t you know the name? I’d have thought you of all people…”

Blankly, Howson returned the gaze. And then he had it.

He shut his eyes; the impact was almost physical. In a husky tone he said, “No — no, I never knew her name. She was deaf and dumb, you see, so she couldn’t tell me. And after she got her speech and hearing she only came to see me a few times.”

“She never wrote you?” Birberger was turning back the leaves of the album. “After all you did for her, too! I’m really surprised. Yes, here we are: ‘A plane from Ulan Bator today brought in eighteen-year-old Mary Hall, the deaf-and-dumb girl who befriended novice telepathist Gerry Howson. She told reporters at the city airport that the operation to give her artificial speech and hearing was completely successful, and now all she wanted was the chance to lead a quiet, normal life.’ Look!”

At first glance he must have missed it because he wanted to, Howson told himself. For the newspaper photo wasn’t a bad one. There she was, standing at the door of the plane: smartly dressed, true, and wearing makeup and with her hair properly styled — but recognizably the girl he had known.

“Is there any chance of finding out where she’s living?” He had uttered the question unplanned, but realized its inevitability while Birberger was still rubbing his chin and considering the problem.

“I’ll get the city directory!” he said, rather too eagerly, as though anxious to get Howson on his way.

There were several dozen Williamses, but only one Stephen Williams. Howson studied the address.

“West Walnut,” he said. “Where’s that ?”

“New district since your time, I believe. Big development outside town. A number nineteen bus goes direct.” Birberger was hardly making any attempt to disguise his desire to see the back of his visitor now.

So Howson, dispirited, accommodated him, paying for his food and beer and gathering up his valise. Birberger stumped to the door with him and insisted on shaking his hand, treating it with care as if touching something rare and fragile. But his invitation to come back as soon as possible rang thin.

On impulse Howson asked him, “Say, Mr Birberger! What’s your picture of the kind of work I do nowadays ?”

Startled, the fat man improvised. “Why, you — you sort of look into crazy people’s minds and tell what’s wrong with them. And straighten them out. Don’t you ?”

“That’s right,” Howson said a little unkindly. “Don’t worry, though — I’m not looking into your mind. After all, you’re not crazy, are you?”

The seeds of the most peculiar kind of doubt were germinating in Birberger’s mind as Howson limped down the street towards the stop for a nineteen bus.

Odd: people’s different reactions to telepathists… Howson contemplated them as he sat in the single seat near the driver up front in the bus. He hadn’t examined that problem for years; at the WHO therapy centre he was in isolation from it, because telepathists had become a completely accepted part of the regular staff.

Occasionally, though not as often as he would have liked, trainees came in, and he assisted with their development. Each was unique, and consequently each responded differently to knowledge of his talent. Some were like children with a newfound toy; others were like members of a family in Nazi Germany, who had just discovered that they had Jewish blood and were desperately pretending it made no difference.

It was getting easier to accept the gift, granted. The years of carefully devised propaganda had had some effect. But telepathists were so few they barely even constituted a minority group, and that, rather than conditioning of the public, had been their salvation — at least in Howson’s view. A tiny fraction of the population had actually met someone with the power; consequently, though most people had opinions (’I don’t doubt they do wonderful work, but I wouldn’t like someone poking around in my mind — I mean, it’s the ultimate invasion of privacy!’) few had formed lasting attitudes.