meant little; it was easy to forget the body when the mind was free.

"What of the others?" Dorrine asked. "Where are the ones who were sentenced before us?"

Houston thought of Robert Harris. What had happened to the young Englishman?

"Space is big," said Juan Pedro. "Perhaps they are too far away for our thoughts to reach them—or perhaps they are already dead."

"Let's not talk of death." Sonali Siddhartha's thought was soft. "We have so many things to do."

"We will have a language session," said Juan Pedro. "Si?"

Matsukuo chuckled. "Good! Houston, until you've tried to learn Spanish, Hindustani, Arabic, Japanese, and French all at once, you don't know what a language session is. We—"

The Hawaiian's thought was suddenly broken off by a shrieking burst of mental static.

The effect was similar to someone dropping a handful of broken glass into an electric meat grinder right in the middle of a Bach cantata.

It was Sager, coming out of his coma.

Almost automatically, the five contacted his mind to relax him as he awoke. They touched his mind—and were repelled!

Stay out of my mind!

With almost savage fury, the still half-conscious Sager hurled thoughts of hatred and fear at the five minds who had tried to help him. They recoiled from the burst of insane emotion.

"Leave him alone," Houston thought sharply. "He's a tough fighter."

At first, Sager was terrified when he learned what had happened to him. Then the terror was mixed with a boiling, seething hatred. A hatred of the Normals who had done this to him, and an even more terrible hatred for Houston, the "traitor."

The very emptiness of space itself seemed to vibrate with the surging violence of his hatred.

"I know," Houston told him, "you'd kill me if you could. But you can't, so forget it."

Not even the power of that hatred could touch Houston, protected as he was by the combined strength of the other four sane telepaths. He was comparatively safe.

Sager snarled like a trapped animal. 

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