“What is the starting salary?” the girl Pat asked, her voice suffused with sardonic suspicion of a cheap, childish sort.

Runciter eyed her. “I don’t even know what you can do.”

“It’s precog, Glen,” Joe Chip grated. “But in a different way.” He did not elaborate; he seemed to have run down, like an old-time battery-powered watch.

“Is she ready to go to work?” Runciter asked Joe. “Or is this one we have to train and work with and wait for? We’ve got almost forty idle inertials and we’re hiring another; forty less, I suppose, eleven. Thirty idle employees, all drawing full scale while they sit around with their thumbs in their noses. I don’t know, Joe; I really don’t. Maybe we ought to fire our scouts. Anyway, I think I’ve found the rest of Hollis’ PSIs. I’ll tell you about it later.” Into his intercom he said, “Specify that we can discharge this Jane Doe without notice, without severance pay or compensation of any kind; nor is she eligible, for the first ninety days, for pension, health or sick-pay benefits.” To Pat he said, “Starting salary, in all cases, begins at four hundred ’creds per month, figuring on twenty hours a week. And you’ll have to join a union. The Mine, Mill and Smelter-workers Union; they’re the one that signed up all the prudence-organization employees three years ago. I have no control over that.”

“I get more,” Pat said, “maintaining vidphone relays at the Topeka Kibbutz. Your scout Mr. Ashwood said—”

“Our scouts lie,” Runciter said. “And, in addition, we’re not legally bound by anything they say. No prudence organization is.” The office door opened and Mrs. Frick crept unsteadily in with the typed-out agreement. “Thank you, Mrs. Frick,” Runciter said, accepting the papers. “I have a twenty-year-old wife in cold-pac,” he said to Joe and Pat. “A beautiful woman who when she talks to me gets pushed out of the way by some weird kid named Jory, and then I’m talking to him, not her. Ella frozen in half-life and dimming out—and that battered crone for my secretary that I have to look at all day long.” He gazed at the girl Pat, with her black, strong hair and her sensual mouth; in him he felt unhappy cravings arise, cloudy and pointless wants that led nowhere, that returned to him empty, as in the completion of a geometrically perfect circle.

“I’ll sign,” Pat said, and reached for the desk pen.

Chapter 5

During the long days of forced, unnatural idleness, the anti-telepath Tippy Jackson slept regularly until noon. An electrode planted within her brain perpetually stimulated EREM—extremely rapid eye movement—sleep, so while tucked within the percale sheets of her bed she had plenty to do.

At this particular moment her artificially induced dream state centered around a mythical Hollis functionary endowed with enormous psionic powers. Every other inertial in the Sol System had either given up or been melted down into lard. By process of elimination, the task of nullifying the field generated by this supernatural entity had devolved to her.

“I can’t be myself while you’re around,” her nebulous opponent informed her. On his face a feral, hateful expression formed, giving him the appearance of a psychotic squirrel.

In her dream Tippy answered, “Perhaps your definition of your self-system lacks authentic boundaries. You’ve erected a precarious structure of personality on unconscious factors over which you have no control. That’s why you feel threatened by me.”

“Aren’t you an employee of a prudence organization?” the Hollis telepath demanded, looking nervously about.

“If you’re the stupendous talent you claim to be,” Tippy said, “you can tell that by reading my mind.”

“I can’t read anybody’s mind,” the telepath said. “My talent is gone. I’ll let you talk to my brother Bill. Here, Bill; talk to this lady. Do you like this lady?”

Bill, looking more or less like his brother the telepath, said, “I like her fine because I’m a precog and she doesn’t postscript me.” He shuffied his feet and grinned, revealing great, pale teeth, as blunt as shovels. “ ‘I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature—’ ” He paused, wrinkling his forehead. “How does it go, Matt?” he asked his brother.

“ ‘—deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up,’ ” Matt the squirrel-like telepath said, scratching meditatively at his pelt.

“Oh, yeah.” Bill the precog nodded. “I remember. ‘And that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them.’ From Richard the Third,” he explained to Tippy. Both brothers grinned. Even their incisors were blunt. As if they lived on a diet of uncooked seeds.

Tippy said, “What does that mean?”

“It means,” both Matt and Bill said in unison, “that we’re going to get you.”

The vidphone rang, waking Tippy up.

Stumbling groggily to it, confounded by floating colored bubbles, blinking, she lifted the receiver and said, “Hello.” God, it’s late, she thought, seeing the clock. I’m turning into a vegetable. Glen Runciter’s face emerged on the screen. “Hello, Mr. Runciter,” she said, standing out of sight of the phone’s scanner. “Has a job turned up for me?”

“Ah, Mrs. Jackson,” Runciter said, “I’m glad I caught you. A group is forming under Joe Chip’s and my direction; eleven in all, a major work assignment for those we choose. We’ve been examining everyone’s history. Joe thinks yours looks good, and I tend to agree. How long will it take you to get down here?” His tone seemed adequately optimistic, but on the little screen his face looked hard-pressed and careworn.

Tippy said, “For this one will I be living—”

“Yes, you’ll have to pack.” Chidingly he said, “We’re supposed to be packed and ready to go at all times; that’s a rule I don’t ever want broken, especially in a case like this where there’s a time factor.”

“I am packed. I’ll be at the New York office in fifteen minutes. All I have to do is leave a note for my husband, who’s at work.”

“Well, okay,” Runciter said, looking preoccupied; he was probably already reading the next name on his list. “Good-bye, Mrs. Jackson.” He rang off.

That was a strange dream, she thought as she hastily unbuttoned her pajamas and hurried back into the bedroom for her clothes. What did Bill and Matt say that poetry was from? Richard the Third, she remembered, seeing in her mind once more their flat, big teeth, their unformed, knob-like, identical heads with tufts of reddish hair growing from them like patches of weeds. I don’t think I’ve ever read Richard the Third, she realized. Or, if I did, it must have been years ago, when I was a child.

How can you dream lines of poetry you don’t know? she asked herself. Maybe an actual nondream telepath was getting at me while I slept. Or a telepath and a precog working together, the way I saw them in my dream. It might be a good idea to ask our research department whether Hollis does, by any remote chance, employ a brother team named Matt and Bill.

Puzzled and uneasy, she began as quickly as possible to dress.

Lighting a green all-Havana Cuesta-Rey palma-supreme, Glen Runciter leaned back in his noble chair, pressed a button of his intercom and said, “Make out a bounty check, Mrs. Frick. Payable to G. G. Ashwood, for one-hundred poscreds.”

“Yes, Mr. Runciter.”

He watched G. G. Ashwood, who paced with manic restlessness about the big office with its genuine hardwood floor against which G. G.’s feet clacked irritatingly. “Joe Chip can’t seem to tell me what she does,” Runciter said.