are comfortable?" the second voice asked.

"Yes."

"The new body is healthy?"

"Completely."

I began to move, sensing in a way I couldn't comprehend the direction from which the thoughts were coming. I stumbled along the side street which led to the Dugout, tracking the bodiless pulsations as an animal trails a scent.

The older one spoke again. "You had no difficulty with the parents?"

"They suspected nothing."

The voices were closer now, but I was alone on the street except for a couple ambling along the shadowed sidewalk a block away. And why would they have to communicate with their minds when they walked arm in arm? I didn't question the actual existence of the voices in my mind. At that moment I believed in them as naturally and unquestioningly as I accepted vocal speech. They were there. I heard them. Even the meaningless question about a "new body" did not make me wonder if the voices were hallucinatory. To talk of bodies as if they could be shed like garments and new ones tried for fit and comfort was nonsense, but I had no thought of making sense of the words I had heard. I wanted only to find their source.

And suddenly I was standing in front of the Dugout staring through the steam-clouded windows. The place was almost empty.

"What is it that you wish me to do?" The young one, calm, matter-of-fact in its subservience. It? He or she? I had no way of telling.

"You have a job—an important one."

There was no doubting the fact that they were inside the Dugout. The sense of mental presence was overpowering, as if one were in a corner of a dark closet listening to two strangers who had huddled in the tiny space and closed the door to whisper confidentially.

"Have you heard—"

I opened the door. Four students in a booth against the wall turned to stare at me. There was a sudden, total silence.

Instinct made me walk casually to the counter, where I slipped onto a stool so placed that I would be able to see the booths along the right wall without 

 Prev. P 15/130 next