The Collected Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell Part 13

The car and radio were dead; the gate was swallowed. The moon poured vitality into the Sentinels; they seemed closer now, threateningly still against the surrounding restless woods. Barbara urged Douglas away from the figures. 'I'm cold,' she told him. 'Please, Doug. Let's stay in the car.'

But Douglas was otherwise alert, to something like the soughing of the trees, yet not. Voices whispering. A chorused hiss: consonants which spat hostility, forming words which he could almost understand. He whirled. It was the radio. Before the others could turn, he had smashed the radio with his heel.

'Doug!' Barbara cried. He saw her hand flash. His cheek blazed, hot as crimson. His fist clenched, then slackened. While she'd thought she was preserving sanity she had lashed out at her own fears. She met his eyes. 'I'm sorry,' she said. She clutched his hand; he didn't respond.

'It's all right.' But it wasn't: once his mother had slapped his face when he'd shrieked at an autumn leaf which had leapt on his coverlet like a spider. In those days she'd made him sell his magazines as soon as he'd filled a shelf-just as Barbara might, he thought. He didn't want a mother or a nurse.

'It's d.a.m.n well not all right,' Ken said. 'Eleven quid that cost. There wasn't eleven quid's worth of b.l.o.o.d.y static in that radio.'

'I'll pay, don't worry.'

'Never mind, Ken, it was a lovely present,' Maureen interrupted. 'We can always get another. Don't let's quarrel.' She crossed to Douglas. 'Where was that stone you didn't know whether to count?'

'Over here.' Barbara stood near the edge of the circle, biting her lip, staring at the turf. Ken followed them.

'Oh, yes. There's another one opposite, I think.' Maureen turned back to Ken. 'Talk to Barb,' she called. 'Doug and I are telling ghost stories.'

'Well, if that's the way it goes, I'll look after Barb,' Ken said, kicking the radio, which had drawn electricity from the moon.

'I don't need looking after!' But Barbara didn't move away. Behind her a shape held up its hands.

'I didn't really want to show.you anything,' Maureen whispered. The head at her elbow seemed intent. 'I didn't want your friend to overhear. I know why you smashed the radio. I felt it too.'

'We'll be all right,' Douglas whispered back. 'There's four of us. Listen, if you feel this way, maybe we really should stay in the car.'

'You were waiting for me?' A smile fluttered across Maureen's mouth. She moved to place him against the wind, which had begun to flap more strongly about them. 'Don't you realize I'm terrified to death? I couldn't show it either. Doug-I keep seeing something running round the edge of the circle.'

'What?' He'd raised his voice; he stared at each figure.

'Not now,' she hissed. 'It's never there when I look at it directly.'

'Listen,' he said intensely, 'I've read about this sort of thing. It might be safer to stay within the circle.'

'Oh, G.o.d, I don't know. I don't know.' Her eyes roamed. 'Look!' she cried.

Something pale had moved; he had thought it was a tree.

The branches had now almost grasped the sinking moon. He peered about the circle. It was still; only the trees between swayed as if possessed. 'There is something,' he whispered, wanting not to tell Maureen, to protect her. 'I'm sure one of the figures has gone. It's the one I had trouble with counting.'

Before he could stop her, she was shouting against the hectic wind: 'You two, quick! Is the circle complete?' She twisted on her axis. The countryside tossed as if in the throes of a nightmare. Ken was yelling: 'One, d.a.m.n it, two, d.a.m.n it-' Then Barbara shrieked: 'No!'

Maureen hid her face on Douglas' chest. 'I know what she's seen,' she mumbled. T don't know which it was. One of the figures isn't stone.' She was trembling. Douglas put his arm about her shoulders.

Ken saw them; his face darkened. He pulled Barbara to him. She thrust him away and backed to the edge of the circle, her fists high. Behind her she was mimicked. Then she saw Maureen and Douglas. She cried out wordlessly and turned. Before they realized, she was stumbling down the hill toward the car.

'She's made it,' Douglas said in Maureen's ear, stroking her hair, trying to caress courage into her. 'If we can follow-' But she was still shaking. He knew what was wrong; they had to pa.s.s between the Sentinels, and he didn't dare to search for what she had seen. The trees were leaping for the moon; the wind was thrusting him toward the Sentinels. He glanced about wildly for Ken. Ken was stooping by the radio, standing up with what he'd found: a razor-sharp fragment of metal.

Then the car started.

Maureen's head turned. Together they ran to the edge of the circle. 'We must make, it,' he told her. 'Close your eyes and cling to me.' But she hadn't closed them when she screamed.

In the road below, the car had conjured forth the gate like an image of escape. They could see Barbara, tiny in the window from which light streamed forth like mist, intent on the dashboard, too intent to notice through the other window the figure squatting like a watchdog.

'The face,' Maureen sobbed, clutching Douglas.

Douglas hurled her away, to Ken, who'd dropped the shard of metal. 'What face?' Ken muttered. 'I can't see.'

'Oh G.o.d,' Douglas shouted. 'Barbara!' The car whipped about, losing the gate, and skidded into the road. A tunnel of trees sprang forth, into which it plunged. The figure ran alongside, skipping high.

Douglas slithered down the gra.s.s, ran panting up the road, falling on stones, running onward. Ahead the tunnel of light dwindled; Barbara had gone. Only the last light of the car and, as it turned a corner, the shape which leapt easily onto the roof.

The others found Douglas kneeling in the road. When they spoke he met their eyes, and they were silent. Together they stared ahead into the night, waiting for the sound.

Call First (1975).

It was the other porters who made Ned determined to know who answered the phone in the old man's house.

Not that he hadn't wanted to know before. He'd felt it was his right almost as soon as the whole thing had begun, months ago. He'd been sitting behind his desk in the library entrance, waiting for someone to try to take a bag into the library so he could shout after them that they couldn't, when the reference librarian ushered the old man up to Ned's desk and said "Let this gentleman use your phone." Maybe he hadn't meant every time the old man came to the library, but then he should have said so. The old man used to talk to the librarian and tell him things about books even he didn't know, which was why he let him phone. All Ned could do was feel resentful. People weren't supposed to use his phone, and even he wasn't allowed to phone outside the building. And it wasn't as if the old man's calls were interesting. Ned wouldn't have minded if they'd been worth hearing.

"I'm coming home now." That was all he ever said; then he'd put down the receiver and hurry away. It was the way he said it that made Ned wonder. There was no feeling behind the words, they sounded as if he were saying them only because he had to, perhaps wis.h.i.+ng he needn't. Ned knew people talked like that: his parents did in church and most of the time at home. He wondered if the old man was calling his wife, because he wore a ring on his wedding-finger, although in the claw where a stone should be was what looked like a piece of yellow fingernail. But Ned didn't think it could be his wife; each day the old man came he left the library at the same time, so why would he bother to phone?

Then there was the way the old man looked at Ned when he phoned: as if he didn't matter and couldn't understand, the way most of the porters looked at him. That was the look that swelled up inside Ned one day and made him persuade one of the other porters to take charge of his desk while Ned waited to listen in on the old man's call. The girl who always smiled at Ned was on the switchboard, and they listened together. They heard the phone in the house ringing then lifted, and the old man's call and his receiver going down: nothing else, not even breathing apart from the old man's. "Who do you think it is?" the girl said, but Ned thought she'd laugh if he said he didn't know. He shrugged extravagantly and left.

Now he was determined. The next time the old man came to the library Ned phoned his house, having read what the old man dialled. When the ringing began its pulse sounded deliberately slow, and Ned felt the pumping of his blood rus.h.i.+ng ahead. Seven trills and the phone in the house opened with a violent click. Ned held his breath, but all he could hear was his blood thumping in his ears. "h.e.l.lo," he said and after a silence, clearing his throat, "h.e.l.lo!" Perhaps it was one of those answering machines people in films used in the office. He felt foolish and uneasy greeting the wide silent metal ear, and put down the receiver. He was in bed and falling asleep before he wondered why the old man should tell an answering machine that he was coming home.

The following day, in the bar where all the porters went at lunchtime, Ned told them about the silently listening phone. "He's weird, that old man," he said, but now the others had finished joking with him they no longer seemed interested, and he had to make a grab for the conversation. "He reads weird books," he said. "All about witches and magic. Real ones, not stories."

"Now tell us something we didn't know," someone said, and the conversation turned its back on Ned. His attention began to wander, he lost his hold on what was being said, he had to smile and nod as usual when they looked at him, and he was thinking: they're looking at me like the old man does. I'll show them. I'll go in his house and see who's there. Maybe I'll take something that'll show I've been there. Then they'll have to listen.

But next day at lunchtime, when he arrived at the address he'd seen on the old man's library card, Ned felt more like knocking at the front door and running away. The house was menacingly big, the end house of a street whose other windows were brightly bricked up. Exposed foundations like broken teeth protruded from the mud that surrounded the street, while the mud was walled in by a five-storey crescent of flats that looked as if it had been designed in sections to be fitted together by a two-year-old. Ned tried to keep the house between him and the flats, even though they were hundreds of yards away, as he peered in the windows.

All he could see through the grimy front window was bare floorboards; when he coaxed himself to look through the side window, the same. He dreaded being caught by the old man, even though he'd seen him sitting behind a pile of books ten minutes ago. It had taken Ned that long to walk here; the old man couldn't walk so fast, and there wasn't a bus he could catch. At last he dodged round the back and peered into the kitchen: a few plates in the sink, some tins of food, an old cooker. n.o.body to be seen. He returned to the front, wondering what to do. Maybe he'd knock after all. He took hold of the bar of the knocker, trying to think what he'd say, and the door opened.

The hall leading back to the kitchen was long and dim. Ned stood shuffling indecisively on the step. He would have to decide soon, for his lunchhour was dwindling. It was like one of the empty houses he'd used to play in with the other children, daring each other to go up the tottering stairs. Even the things in the kitchen didn't make it seem lived in. He'd show them all. He went in. Acknowledging a vague idea that the old man's companion was out, he closed the door to hear if they returned.

On his right was the front room; on his left, past the stairs and the phone, another of the bare rooms he'd seen. He tiptoed upstairs. The stairs creaked and swayed a little, perhaps unused to anyone of Ned's weight. He reached the landing, breathing heavily, feeling dust chafe his throat. Stairs led up to a closed attic door, but he looked in the rooms off the landing.

Two of the doors which he opened stealthily showed him nothing but boards and flurries of floating dust. The landing in front of the third looked cleaner, as if the door were often opened. He pulled it towards him, holding it up all the way so it didn't sc.r.a.pe the floor, and went in.

Most of it didn't seem to make sense. There was a single bed with faded sheets. Against the walls were tables and piles of old books. Even some of the books looked disused. There were black candles and racks of small cardboard boxes. On one of the tables lay a single book. Ned padded across the fragments of carpet and opened the book in a thin path of sunlight through the shutters.

Inside the sagging covers was a page which Ned slowly realised had been ripped from the Bible. It was the story of Lazarus. Scribbles that might be letters filled the margins, and at the bottom of the page: "people. 491." Suddenly inspired, Ned turned to that page in the book. It showed a drawing of a corpse sitting up in his coffin, but the book was all in the language they sometimes used in church: Latin. He thought of asking one of the librarians what it meant. Then he remembered that he needed proof he'd been in the house. He stuffed the page from the Bible into his pocket.

As he crept swiftly downstairs, something was troubling him. He reached the hall and thought he knew what it was. He still didn't know who lived in the house with the old man. If they lived in the back perhaps there would be signs in the kitchen. Though if it was his wife, Ned thought as he hurried down the hall, she couldn't be like Ned's mother, who would never have left torn strips of wallpaper hanging at shoulder height from both walls. He'd reached the kitchen door when he realised what had been bothering him. When he'd emerged from the bedroom, the attic door had been open.

He looked back involuntarily, and saw a woman walking away from him down the hall.

He was behind the closed kitchen door before he had time to feel fear. That came only when he saw that the back door was nailed rustily shut. Then he controlled himself. She was only a woman, she couldn't do much if she found him. He opened the door minutely. The hall was empty.

Halfway down the hall he had to slip into the side room, heart punching his chest, for she'd appeared again from between the stairs and the front door. He felt the beginnings of anger and recklessness, and they grew faster when he opened the door and had to flinch back as he saw her hand pa.s.sing. The fingers looked famished, the colour of old lard, with long yellow cracked nails. There was no nail on her wedding-finger, which wore a plain ring. She was returning from the direction of the kitchen, which was why Ned hadn't expected her.

Through the opening of the door he heard her padding upstairs. She sounded barefoot. He waited until he couldn't hear her, then edged out into the hall. The door began to swing open behind him with a faint creak, and he drew it stealthily closed. He paced towards the front door. If he hadn't seen her shadow creeping down the stairs he would have come face to face with her.

He'd retreated to the kitchen, and was near to panic, when he realised she knew he was in the house. She was playing a game with him. At once he was furious. She was only an old woman, her body beneath the long white dress was sure to be as thin as her hands, she could only shout when she saw him, she couldn't stop him leaving. In a minute he'd be late for work. He threw open the kitchen door and swaggered down the hall.

The sight of her lifting the phone receiver broke his stride for a moment. Perhaps she was phoning the police. He hadn't done anything, she could have her Bible page back. But she laid the receiver beside the phone. Why? Was she making sure the old man couldn't ring?

As she unbent from stooping to the phone she grasped two uprights of the banisters to support herself. They gave a loud splintering creak and bent together. Ned halted, confused. He was still struggling to react when she turned towards him, and he saw her face. Part of it was still on the bone.

He didn't back away until she began to advance on him, her nails tearing new strips from both walls. All he could see was her eyes, unsupported by flesh. His mind was backing away faster than he was, but it had come up against a terrible insight. He even knew why she'd made sure the old man couldn't interrupt until she'd finished. His calls weren't like speaking to an answering machine at all. They were exactly like switching off a burglar alarm.

Murders (1975).

ONE.

All right, Mounth,' I said. 'I hope you're ready to die.'

The point of my knife pursued him as if he were magnetic north. Light touched the edge, then spilled across the blade. Mounth had retreated towards the back of Holoshows Studios, until an angle of the wall arrested his shoulders. As he made a timid attempt to scurry free I closed in, and he was crucified and quivering against the walls, and I felt the knife light on my fingers as it sailed forward for the first easy incision, and I noticed that the white walls against which Mounth was pressed were vividly lit. But it was supposed to be night. I tried to ignore the error, but my sense of it wouldn't let me alone. Maird, I swore, and began to reconceive. Without distractions I would have just about enough time.

'All right, Mounth,' I said. 'I hope you're ready to die.'

He was squeezing himself back between the walls. It was dark, and darker within the angle, so that I couldn't see his face. Maird, I thought, maird. Then I heard Thaw getting into his car behind me. Its beam wavered a little, then snapped into place as a frame around Mounth. Thaw sat watching, appreciatively smiling, as I began to open Mounth up with the knife. Mounth's squeals urged me on, but his blood seemed too bright, no doubt because I'd seen little of the real thing, and there wasn't much of it, though my mind would have rejected profusion: indeed, had done so. I finished murdering him and stepped down from my throne, feeling rather disappointed, a minute before they switched off the power.

I stood in the centre of my apartment, gazing at the pastel rainbow whorls and curlicues of the walls, wondering whether Mounth knew I'd been killing him. Probably not, since he was involved in the first of what he'd a.s.sured us were the most important shows of his career. Anyway, I didn't care. I glanced at the holocast receivers pointing down into the comer of the room and thought of finding out what Mounth was saying. But I wouldn't; I kept my nights free from Holoshows completely free. And all because of Mounth, I thought. He was the latest and by far the worst of our troubles.

I switched off the windowframes. Activating them had been the product of habit; n.o.body was ever burgled on the fifteen-mile level, few people were burgled at all. But the government insisted we made ourselves safe during throne-time, so that n.o.body could accuse them of promoting crime. n.o.body except Mounth.

I gazed from the window. At night you might as well be on the viewless ground level as on the fifteen-mile, and even during the day you could seldom see as far as that. I looked down towards the windows of the ten- and twelve-milers, bright discs and polygons set in implicit unseen planes of darkness, their total composition occasionally s.h.i.+fting minutely. I wondered how many people had felt compelled by guilt or fear to watch Mounth's holocast and to forego their thrones. I wondered again if he'd felt me murdering him. I would know tomorrow, I felt vulnerability and triumph swiftly mingling, and my mind retreated to the time before Mounth.

Not that Holoshows had ever been free of troubles. What is? Even the initial advertising of the new experience had fumbled somewhat, largely because the board hadn't wanted the public to dismiss Holoshows as just another disappointment hiding behind the images of an advertising cartel. Tridi was losing huge amounts of cash and credibility to its image, and the inevitable rise in fees was losing it subscribers by the thousand. Holoshows didn't intend to go that way, and we had created our own advertising. But for a while that threatened us as much as it sold. Except you can't touch it, it's solid, we said, and the tridi newscasts grabbed themselves interviewees who said they could see their apartment floor through a perfect holocast-but only by concentrating on one spot for more than an hour, as we eventually discovered and pointed out. If you walk into it you'll harm the holocast, not your health, we said belatedly as the tridis began interviewing mothers who thought their children were being lured into a deadly laser beam (instead of our harmless-for-half-an-hour variety). Our holocasts can't talk but you'll never know, we said to the people the tridis prompted to complain when they found they had to buy speakers as well as receivers and holostage cube. But: she's young, she's pretty, you can't touch but she doesn't mind what else, we said and had a rush of censorious good taste only just before the government did.

I shouldn't say 'we' about that period, but I feel it. I was working for tridis then. When their sniping at Holoshows became embarra.s.sing, and the ridiculousness of their attacks clear to everyone but themselves, I went to direct for Holoshows. I'd worked out new techniques of tridi editing and camera handling, and now I translated these into holocast terms. Ego break: until I came they hadn't even thought of taking the holocameras 360 around anything, let alone how. But my experiments were all formal. They didn't risk offending the government.

The government: they were our main trouble, or-more accurately-threat. They were teetering between the extremes of their two parties. They would touch an extreme and spark off a bill, then a year later to n.o.body's surprise they might ratify an almost direct contradiction. Work together, hurt n.o.body and the rest of your time within your own walls is your own; improve yourself, improve the worlds for your children, without help the future's always worse than now. Of course there was more than that to the parties, but it was often impossible to see what. Which made it especially difficult for Holoshows.

It sometimes amazed us how much we achieved. Our more blatant victories owed all to Thaw's strategy. Thaw was resident lawyer at Holoshows. Like most successful lawyers he'd been trained as a psychologist, and there was a whole psychological method in the way he used his stick as pointer, hinted threat, symbol of imminent victory, distracting pendulum as well as a third leg. But his gaunt frame and almost bone-tight skin, refusing wrinkles, were the emblems of decades of experience. It was Thaw, for example, who meditated a compromise on the holocasting of violence. Not that the majority of the government felt that the emulation of holocasts was consistent enough to be legislated for. No, the psychological effect we were accused of producing was subtler: a sort of vague domestic schizophrenia in which people felt dimly caged by apathy, the effect of violence transmitted so persuasively that it became indistinguishable from the real within one's walls. No use our asking why violence, nor our pointing out that the squirts of always slightly unconvincing studio blood vanished in midair (accurately, at the surface of the holostage cube). All we could do was transmit a bright coloured outline to the cube itself when violence was imminent and wait for cancellations to arrive from, in the literal sense, disillusioned subscribers.

'If you can stand realizing your best isn't always good enough,' Thaw once said to me, 'you'll survive anything life can throw at you.'

He might have been talking about the violence box, as we called the outlined cube, but in fact it was a year later and we'd had worse trouble: indeed, our earlier trouble in purest crystal form. The wife of the Minister for Media had left the room during one of our drama holocasts, and had returned to find a yard-high slightly drooping breast squatting in the corner of the room, the vision of a young holocameraman turned briefly avant-garde director. Arriving home minutes later to find his wife in hysterics, the minister called Emergency Power Control and talked quietly and coldly until they'd cut the domestic entertainments supply for hundreds of miles around the capital. Then: a commission of inquiry, threats of prosecution to half the staff at Holoshows.

Thaw took one glance at the robed bodies of the elderly women who were more than half of the commission and said that the holocast had been meant to express the director's sense of beauty. But meanwhile the minister's wife had wobbled on the edge of a breakdown, and (perhaps from an alarming and astonis.h.i.+ngly single-minded sympathy) the majority of the government had upheld the minister's action. Tridis had embraced puritanism and sunk, but we were doing little better as our subscribers relinquished a medium which could be put out of action at whim. Everyone at Holoshows, even Thaw, was chasing the tail of depression.

Then Mounth arrived and offered a telepath show.

Telepath shows had been briefly in fas.h.i.+on some decades ago. They'd been burdened with t.i.tles such as the Tridi Telepath Talkshow but these weren't the main reason why they'd died. So you could watch a perfect tridi of someone talking to guests whose evasions he could read: so? Hardly anyone became involved enough to sue. And when someone did, the law established that while unauthorized telepathy was still illegal, a.s.suming the user was stupid enough to make it obvious, anyone who appeared on a telepath show had authorized telepathy by so doing. That decision was worth a few seconds at the end of a tridi newscast, and when the telepath shows were quietly faded, soon after, it was generally agreed that what they'd needed had been far more purpose and force. Mounth had a great deal of both.

I was at Holoshows the day he was interviewed. I saw him stride into Reception, smile warmly but without familiarity at our receptionist, sit his lumberjack frame like a clear-cut sharply pointed statement on one of Reception's stools, hold his open alert face up to anyone who pa.s.sed, eager to be called to speak.

It was then I was convinced for the first time that the old sour belief about telepaths was true: that they adjusted their image each time they felt someone's opinion of them, until they'd perfected it. I didn't see him go in, but in another corridor I met the interview board on their way, their faces saying last resort, try anything, what have we come to, and Thaw's reiterating his favourite maxim that you can't afford to lose hope until whatever it is has been proved hopeless. He held up a lazy finger to confirm we would talk in an hour.

In fact it was closer to two, and while Thaw was telling me the interview was already becoming legend at Holo-shows. Especially Mounth's final speech: 'You, sir, you're wondering if the people can identify with a telepath, even one who's fighting for their rights,' he said. 'I think they can if he's fighting as hard as I will. And you, sir, think that I couldn't keep it up for long. But there's a lot wrong with our world, and I think we should give people the chance to see it all. And you suspect my motives because I used to earn so much as a salesman. But I had to earn money before I could do what I should be doing, if only to give my parents a real home. And you' (who was Thaw) 'think I can influence you into hiring me. I can't, I'm not that sort of telepath, which is why I have to be honest. I can't avoid reading what you think about me but I could have avoided admitting it to you. I've been honest and you can show me the door if you wish. But there's no use my avoiding honesty and truth, because they're what my show will be based on if you let me have it. You've said yourselves that today people won't let advertising play with them in any way. I'm sure you'll agree that it's still truth that sells.'

'That man's trouble,' Thaw said to me. 'There's no way of telling them that, without looking as if I'm trying to cheat Holoshows of their last chance. But I for one shall be watching him very carefully.'

TWO.

Watching the early, weekly, editions of Truthlight I began to feel that Thaw had allowed himself to be piqued by Mounth's reading of him. That was the period in which Mounth was challenging cartel bosses. He eased in his chat, probing gently and levering open his victim all the way back to a tiny original motivation, perhaps buried deep in a disowned childhood episode, which Mounth would pull forth writhing, shameful and ba.n.a.l. Only then would he slam in the errors which he'd known his victim hoped he wouldn't mention. 'See you in six months,' Mounth would say. 'I know then you'll be able to talk to me and the people as friends.'

'There's nothing you can't reduce to an origin which is trivial or disgraceful, if you try hard enough,' Thaw said to him after one Truthlight show. 'It seems to me the point is what's achieved, not where it came from.'

'I know appearances are your job,' Mounth said, 'but they're not the same thing as truth.'

I was inclined to agree with him. In the six months he gave them, most of the bosses improved things for their subsidiaries, their employees, often for the public too. Most of them now always masked themselves with secretaries, but that was surely a small price for them to pay. A few improved nothing and bl.u.s.tered publicly about attempted brainwas.h.i.+ng; but they were the first to discover that those who refused Mounth's invitations were announced on each Truthlight until they gave in. No use anyone saying he had nothing publicly significant to disclose, as Mounth listed the investors, and the investments began to be hastily if apologetically pulled away by vaguely threatened consciences. 'If it's me you object to,' Mounth said into the holocamera as the names he was addressing snapped into a frame behind his head, 'I imagine the government would arrange for you to be examined by a social telepath.' There were smiles of appreciation in the studio at that, and one of them was mine.

I was particularly pleased when he took on the social telepaths themselves. Yes, I knew that the reason he could line up four of them to interview in the studio was that the government didn't dare forbid them to appear; Mounth was already as powerful as that.

'Don't look so uneasy, Thaw,' I said. 'The government never did much for us.' But he was frowning at Mounth addressing the telepaths from within his almost invisible protective cube, on which a few of his interviewees had thumped wildly.

'Of course we all know that the only thing we mustn't do within our own walls is harm,' Mounth was saying. 'And we know that one of your jobs is defining and preventing harm. It's a difficult job and I know we all admire those who do it well. But outside our own walls it's up to us all to be vigilant. Now I gather a few of the poorer people not a hundred miles north of here have been soliciting. It's quite illegal, of course, and I'm sure we'd agree with the government that n.o.body's so poor that it's necessary. It's the sort of thing that might make a sentimental person disobey government rules,' his gaze settling on the trapped expression of a tele-path which the holocamera didn't catch, 'but I shouldn't be surprised if I didn't even have to mention it again.'

'I've seen the people on the north side,' Thaw said to me, 'and even when Holoshows were at their worst those people made me feel like a millionaire.'

Me too, but I didn't say that; I said 'I'll admit he could have carried his economic redistribution a bit further before starting this.'