"What?"
"You know. Makes you full of life. You get to breathe that air and feel the blood pumping, hey?...Walked too far this time. Hate to get back after night by my lonesome. Always glad for the company. Where you going?"
It was the second time Natter had asked the question, and the Mind Touch made plain the importance attached to it. Schwartz wondered how long he could evade the issue. There was a questing anxiety in the follower's mind. And no lie would do. Schwartz didn't know enough about this new world to lie.
He said, "I'm going to the hospital."
"The hospital? What hospital?"
"I was there when I was in Chica."
"You mean the Institute. Ain't that it? That's where I took you before, that time in the department store, I mean." Anxiety and increasing tension.
"To Dr. Shekt," said Schwartz. "Do you know him?"
"I've heard of him. He's a big shot. Are you sick?"
"No, but I'm supposed to report once in a while." Did that sound reasonable?
"Walking?" said Natter. "Doesn't he send a car for you?" Apparently it did not seem reasonable.
Schwartz said nothing now-a clammy silence.
Natter, however, was buoyant. "Look here, chum, soon's I pass a public Communi-wave, I'll order a taxi from the city. It'll meet us on the road."
"A Communi-wave?"
"Sure. They have 'em all along the highway. See, there's one."
He took a step away from Schwartz, and the latter found himself in a sudden shriek. "Stop! Don't move."
Natter stopped. There was a queer coldness in his expression as he turned. "What's eating you, bud?"
Schwartz found the new language almost inadequate for the rapidity with which he hurled words at the other. "I'm tired of this acting. I know you, and I know what you're going to do. You're going to call somebody to tell them I'm going to Dr. Shekt. They'll be ready for me in the city and they'll send out a car to pick me up. And you'll kill me if I try to get away."
There was a frown on Natter's face. He muttered, "You're sure right on the gizzbo with that last-" It was not intended for Schwartz's ears, nor did it reach them, but the words rested lightly on the very surface of his Mind Touch.
Aloud he said, "Mister, you've got me confused. You're shoving a fast one right past my nose." But he was making room, and his hand was drifting toward his hip.
And Schwartz lost control of himself. He waved his arms in a wild fury. "Leave me alone, why don't you? What have I done to you?...Go away! Go away/"
He ended in a voice-cracked shriek, his forehead ridged with hate and fear of the creature who stalked him and whose mind was so alive with enmity. His own emotions heaved and thrust at the Mind Touch, attempting to evade the clingingness of it, rid itself of the breath of it
And it was gone. Suddenly and completely gone. There had been the momentary consciousness of overwhelming pain-not in himself, but in the other-then nothing. No Mind Touch. It had dropped away like the grip of a fist growing lax and dead.
Natter was a crumpled smear on the darkening highway. Schwartz crept toward him. Natter was a little man, easy to turn over. The look of agony on his face might have been stamped on, deeply, deeply. The lines remained, did not relax. Schwartz felt for the heartbeat and did not find it.
He straightened in a deluge of self-horror.
He had murdered a man!
And then a deluge of amazement- Without touching him! He had killed this man just by hating him, by striking somehow at the Mind Touch.
What other powers did he have? He made a quick decision. He searched the other's pockets and found money. Good! He could use that. Then he dragged the corpse into the fields and let the high grass cover it.
He walked on for two hours. No other Mind Touch disturbed him.
He slept in an open field that night, and the next morning, after two hours more, reached the outskirts of Chica.
Chica was only a village to Schwartz, and by comparison with the Chicago he remembered, the motion of the populace was still thin and sporadic. Even so, the Mind Touches were for the first time numerous. They amazed and confused him.
So many! Some drifting and diffuse; some pointed and intense. There were men who passed with their minds popping in tiny explosions; others with nothing inside their skulls but, perhaps, a gentle rumination on the breakfast just completed.
At first Schwartz turned and jumped with every Touch that passed, taking each as a personal contact; but within the hour he learned to ignore them.
He was hearing words now, even when "they were not actually mouthed. This was something new, and he found himself listening. They were thin, eery phrases, disconnected and wind-whipped; far off, far off...And with them, living, crawling emotion and other subtle things that cannot be described-so that all the world was a panorama of boiling life visible to himself only.
He found he could penetrate buildings as he walked, sending his mind in as though it were something he held on a leash, something that could suck its way into crannies invisible to the eye and bring out the bones of men's inner thoughts.
It was before a huge stone-fronted building that he halted, and considered. They (whoever they were) were after him. He had killed the follower, but there must be others-the others that the follower had wanted to call. It might be best for him to make no move for a few days, and how to do that best?...A job?..."
He probed the building before which he had stopped. In there was a distant Mind Touch that to him might mean a job. They were looking for textile workers in there-and he had once been a tailor.
He stepped inside, where he was promptly ignored by everyone. He touched someone's shoulder.