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By Root 1816 0

me, that hit. Onetime monthsback I was drinking shorts in a seedy slouch and through the wall I probed a jaded businessman who'd had his fill of everything and wanted out. He'd paid a cool half million for the pleasure of ending his life, and he went with an extravaganza. Subjectivewise he lived another eighty years and his pineal bloomed to show him the evolution of his kind. I tripped along with him until he died, then I staggered back to my pad. I was zonked for three days following, and for another week hallucinated Pithecanthropus and Neanderthal Man dancing the light fantastic on the boulevard. Only later did I get vague flashbacks, memories of the vast, impenetrable blackness that swallowed the oldster when the drug blew his head. It frightened me at first, this intangible nothingness I could neither experience nor understand. In time, a month maybe, I managed to push it away somewhere, forget.

Then I was back drifting again, seeking.

I'd black my connected-minds symbol and probe, discarding heads by the thousand one after the other as they each displayed the same flawed formulas. Some heads were better than others, but even the better ones were tainted with greed and selfishness and hate. And then there were the really bad ones, the heads that struck me at a distance with their freight of evil, that stood out in a crowd like cancer cells in lymph gland.

Then there were the shielded minds, in which anything might be lurking.

I found Joe Gomez in a bar called the Yin-Yang.

It's an underground dive with a street level entrance washed in the flutter of a defective fluorescent. Three figures were standing in the silver sometimes-light that night, and something about them caught my attention. They wore the fashionable greys of rich businessmen, and their minds were shielded. They were discussing something among themselves in a tone which suggested they had no wish to be overheard. And one of the guys had o-o tattooed on his cheek.

Now what the hell were three uptown executives doing whispering outside a slum bar at four o'clock in the morning? As sure as Allah is Allah not transacting business, I reasoned.

But I was wrong. They were.

I got close and listened in on their whispers. At the same time I became aware of an emanation from the subterranean Yin-Yang. The two connected. Casualwise, I slipped past the three execs and, once out of sight, jumped the steps two by two. The emanation was the sweet music of violin over din. My quest was almost over.

But not quite. I had to get him out, first.

The bar was a slouch. Felled junkies littered the various levels of the padded floor. I found the barman and asked him if the place had another entrance, and he indicated west.

Then I looked around and probed.

The guy with the harmonious brainvibes sat against the far wall, drinking beer. He wore the blue one-piece of an off-duty spacer, and I read with surprise that he was an Engineman. He was good-looking too in a dark, Spanish kind of way.

I glanced at the entrance. There was no sign of the executives. They were no doubt still debating whether this was the guy they intended to scrape. Obviously their telepath was a few grades below me; I knew immediately that the spacer was prime material for what they had in mind.

I projected an aura of authority and crossed the slouch. "Joe Gomez?"

He looked up, startled; surprised at being paged by a not-so-good-looking black girl. I realised that the telepath outside would be getting all this, too. So I slipped my shield from my tunic and palmed it onto his coverall. Then I grabbed his arm and blitzed him with a burst of life-or-death urgency.

As we hurried to the far door and up the steps I caught the tantalizing whiff of flux on his body. Then we were outside and swamped in the collective odours of a dozen ethnic fastfoods. "This way."

I ran him up the alley and under an arch, then down a parallel thruway and up an overpass. Crowds got in the way and we barged through, making good progress. Years of drifting had superimposed a routemap of the quarter on my cortex. The execs