Hidden Talent

The spaceport on Mondarran IV was a small one, as might be expected on the sort of fifth-rate backwater world it was. Rygor Davison picked up his lone suitcase at the baggage depot and struck out into the dry, windy heat of mid-afternoon. The sun—G-type, hot—was high overhead, and a dusty brown dirt road ran crookedly away from the rudimentary spaceport toward a small gray village about a thousand meters away.

There was no one on hand to greet him. Not an impressive welcome, he thought, and began to walk down the dirt road toward the village which would be his home for the next five years—if he survived.

After he had gone half a dozen steps, he heard someone behind him, turned, and saw a small boy, heavily tanned, come trotting down the road. He was about eleven, and clad in a pair of golden swim trunks and nothing else. He seemed to be in a hurry.

“Whoa, youngster!” Davison called.

The boy looked up questioningly, slowed, and stopped, panting slightly. “Just get here? I saw the ship come down!”

Davison grinned. “Just got here. What’s the hurry?”

“Witch,” the boy gasped. “They’re giving him the business this afternoon. I don’t want to miss it. Come on—hurry along.”

Davison stiffened. “What’s going to happen, boy?”

“They’re roasting a witch,” the boy said, speaking very clearly, as one would to an idiot or an extremely young child. “Hurry along, if you want to get there on time—but don’t make me miss it.”

Davison hefted his suitcase and began to stride rapidly alongside the boy, who urged him impatiently on. Clouds of dust rose from the road and swirled around them.

A witch-burning, eh? He shuddered despite himself, and wondered if the Esper Guild had sent him to his death.

The Guild of Espers operated quietly but efficiently. They had found Davison, had trained him, had developed his enormous potential of telekinetic power. And they had sent him to the outworlds to learn how not to use it.

It had been Lloyd Kechnie, Davison’s guide, who explained it to him. Kechnie was a wiry, brighteyed man with a hawk’s nose and a gorilla’s eyebrows. He had worked with Davison for eight years.

“You’re a damned fine telekinetic,” Kechnie told him. “The guild can’t do anything more for you. And in just a few years, you’ll be ready for a full discharge.”

“Few years? But I thought—”

“You’re the best tk I’ve seen,” said Kechnie. “You’re so good that by now it’s second nature for you to use your power. You don’t know how to hide it. Someday you’ll regret that. You haven’t learned restraint.” Kechnie leaned forward over his desk. “Ry, we’ve decided to let you sink or swim—and you’re not the first we’ve done this to. We’re going to send you to a psiless world—one where the powers haven’t been developed. You’ll be forced to hide your psi, or else be stoned for witchcraft or some such thing.”

“Can’t I stay on Earth and learn?” Davison asked hopefully.

“Uh-uh. It’s too easy to get by here. In the outworlds, you’ll face an all-or-nothing situation. That’s where you’re going.”

Davison had gone on the next ship. And now, on Mondarran IV, he was going to learn—or else.

“Where you come from?” the boy asked, after a few minutes of silence. “You goin’ to be a colonist here?”

“For a while,” Davison said. “I’m from Dariak III.” He didn’t want to give any hint of his Earth background. Dariak III was a known psiless world. It might mean his life if they suspected he was an esper.

“Dariak III?” the boy said. “Nice world?”

“Not very,” Davison said. “Rains a lot.”

Suddenly a flash of brilliant fire burst out over the village ahead, illuminating the afternoon sky like a bolt of low-mounting lightning.

“Oh, damn,” the boy said disgustedly. “There’s the flare. I missed the show after all. I guess I should have started out earlier.”

“Too late, eh?” Davison felt more than a little relieved. He licked dry lips. “Guess we missed all the fun.”

“It’s real exciting,” the boy said enthusiastically. “Especially when they’re good witches, and play tricks before we can bum ’em. You should see some of the things they do, once we’ve got ’em pinned to the stake.”

I can imagine, Davison thought grimly. He said nothing.

They continued walking, moving at a slower pace now, and the village grew closer. He could pick out the nearer buildings fairly clearly, and was able to discern people moving around in the streets. Overhead, the sun pelted down hard.

A shambling, ragged figure appeared and came toward them as they headed down the final twist in the road. “Hello, Dumb Joe,” the boy said cheerily, as the figure approached.

The newcomer grunted a monosyllable and kept moving. He was tall and gaunt-looking, with a grubby growth of beard, open-seamed moccasins, and a battered leather shirt. He paused as he passed Davison, looked closely into his face, and smiled, revealing yellow-stained teeth.

“Got a spare copper, friend?” Dumb Joe asked in a deep, rumbling voice. “Somethin’ for a poor man?”

Davison fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a small coin. The boy glared at him disapprovingly, but he dropped the coin into the waiting palm of the panhandler.

“Best of luck, mister,” the beggar said, and shuffled away. After a few steps he turned and said, “Too bad you missed the roasting, mister. It was real good.”

They proceeded on into the town. Davison saw that it consisted of a sprawling group of two-story shacks, prefabs, apparently, strung loosely around a central plaza—in the heart of which, Davison noticed, was a sturdy steel post with something unpleasant smouldering at its base. He shuddered, and looked away.

“What’s the matter, mister?” the boy asked derisively. “Don’t they roast witches on Dariak III?”

“Not very often,” Davison said. He found that his fingers were trembling, and he struggled to regain control over them.

He thought of Kechnie, comfortably back on Earth. While he was out here, on a fly-plagued dust hole of a world, doomed to spend the next five years in a two-bit village twiddling his thumbs. It was like a prison sentence.

No—worse. In prison, you don’t have any worries. You just go through your daily rock-crumbling, and they give you three meals and a place, of sorts, to sleep. No agonies.

Here it was different. Davison barely repressed a curse. He’d have to be on constant lookout, supressing his psi, hiding his power—or he’d wind up shackled to that steel gibbet in the central plaza, providing a morning’s entertainment for the villagers before he went up in flames.

Then he grinned. Kechnie knows what he’s doing, he admitted despite himself. If I survive this, I’ll be fit for anything they can throw at me.

He squared his shoulders, fixed a broad grin on his face, and headed forward into the town.

A tall man with a weather-creased face the color of curdled turpentine came toward him, loping amiably.

“Hello, stranger. My name’s Domarke—I’m the Mayor. You new down here?”

Davison nodded. “Just put down from Dariak III. Thought I’d try my luck here.”

“Glad to have you, friend,” Domarke said pleasantly. “Too bad you missed our little show. You probably saw the flare from the spaceport.”

“Sorry I missed it too,” Davison forced himself to say. “You have much trouble with witches down here?”

Domarke’s face darkened. “A little,” he said. “Not much. Every once in a while, there’s a guy who pulls off some kind of fancy stunt. We’ve been pretty quick to send them to their Master the second we spot them. We don’t want none of that kind here, brother.”

“I don’t blame you,” Davison said. “Men aren’t supposed to do things the way those guys do.”

“Nossir,” the Mayor said. “But we fix ’em when they do. There was a fellow down from Lanargon Seven last year, took a job here as a beekeeper. Nice boy—young, with a good head on his shoulders. Saw a lot of my daughter. We all liked him. We never suspected he was a wronger.”

“Witch, eh?”

“Sure was,” Domarke said. “Swarm of his bees got loose and broke up. They come after him, and started stinging away. Next thing we know, he’s looking at them kinda funny and fire starts shootin’ from his fingertips.” Domarke shook his head retrospectively. “Burned all those bees to tatters. He didn’t even try to stop us when we strung him up.”

“Strung him up? How come you didn’t burn him?” Davison asked, morbidly curious.

Domarke shrugged. “Wasn’t any point to it. Those guys in league with fire, you don’t get anywhere trying to burn ’em. We hang them on the spot.”

One of Kechnie’s boys, probably, Davison thought. A pyrotic sent out here to learn how to control his power. He didn’t learn fast enough.

He chewed at his lower lip for a second and said, “Guess it’s about time I got to my point. Who can I see about getting a room in this town?”

They found him a room with a family named Rinehart, on a small farm about ten minutes’ walk from the heart of the village. They had posted a sign advertising for a hired hand.

He moved in that afternoon, unpacked his meager belongings, and hung up his jacket in the tiny closet they provided. Then he went downstairs to meet his hosts.

It was a family of five. Rinehart was a balding man of fifty-five or so, dark skinned from long hours of toil in the blazing sun, heavy-jowled and jovial. His wife—Ma—was a formidable woman in an amazingly archaic-looking apron. Her voice was a mellow masculine boom, and she radiated an atmosphere of simple, traditional folksiness. It was, thought Davison, a frame of mind long since extinct on so sophisticated a planet as Earth.

They had three children—Janey, a long-legged, full-bodied girl of eighteen or so; Bo, a sullen-faced, muscular seventeen-year-old; and Buster, a chubby eleven-year-old. It seemed to be a happy familial setup, thought Davison.

He left his room—painstakingly opening and closing the door by hand—and ambled down the stairs. He slipped on the fourth from the bottom, started to slide, and teeked against the landing to hold himself upright. He caught his balance, straightened up, and then, as he realized what he had done, he paused and felt cold droplets of sweat starting out on his forehead.

No one had seen. No one this time.

But how many more slips would there be?

He let the shock filter out of his nervous system, waited a moment while the blood returned to his cheeks, and then finished descending the stairs and entered the living-room. The Rineharts were already gathered.

“Evening, Ry!” Rinehart said pleasantly.

“Evening, sir,” Davison said. He smiled at the rest of them, and took a seat.

“All unpacked?” Ma Rinehart asked. “You like your room?”

“It’s fine, Mrs. Rinehart.”

“Ma, if you don’t mind.”

“All right—Ma. I like the room just fine. I’m going to be very happy here.”

“Sure you are,” Rinehart said. “Maybe it’s not as fancy a place as some, but you’ll like it here. We’re good people on this world—sound, sane, feet-on-the-ground people. I can’t think of any planet I’d rather live on.”

“At the moment, neither can I,” Davison lied. “After Dariak III, anything would be an improvement.”

“It’s a damned rainy world there,” Rinehart muttered. “You’ll get some good sun on your face here. Two weeks out in my fields and you’ll lose that fishbelly paleness of yours, Ry.”

Janey appeared in the doorway and glanced indolently at Davison. “Supper’s on,” she said.

Rinehart scooped himself out of his big chair and they followed him to the kitchen, ranging themselves around the table. “That seat down there’s yours,” Rinehart said.

Davison sat down. Rinehart, at the head of the table, uttered a brief but devout blessing, finishing up with a word of prayer for the new hired hand who had come among them. Then Janey appeared from the back with a tray of steaming soup.

“Hot stuff,” she said, and Bo and Buster moved apart to let her serve it. She brought the tray down—and then it happened. Davison saw it starting, and bit his lip in anguish.

One of the scalding bowls of soup began to slide off the end of the tray. He watched, almost in slow motion, as it curled over the lip of the tray, dipped, and poured its steaming contents on his bare right arm.

Tears of pain came to his eyes—and he didn’t know which hurt more, the pain of the soup on his arm or the real shock he had received when he had forced himself to keep from teeking the falling soup halfway across the room.

He bit hard into his lip, and sat there, shivering from the mental effort the restraint had cost him.

Janey put down the tray and fussed embarrassedly over him. “Gee, Ry, I didn’t mean that! Gosh, did I bum you?”

“I’ll live,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself about it.”

He mopped the soup away from his corner of the table, feeling the pain slowly subside.

Kechnie, Kechnie, you didn’t send me on any picnic!

Rinehart gave him a job, working in the fields.

The staple crop of Mondarran IV was something called Long Beans, a leguminous vegetable that everyone ate in great quantities, pounded down into wheat, and used for a dozen other purposes. It was a tough, almost indestructible plant that yielded three crops a year in the constant warmth of Mondarran IV.

Rinehart had a small farm, ten acres or so, spreading out over a rolling hill that overlooked a muddy swimming-hole. It was almost time for the year’s second crop, and that meant a laborious process of stripping the stalks of the twisted pods that contained beans.

There were, of course, machines that whisked down the rows of plants, ripping loose the pods and depositing them in a hopper in which the beans were extracted, the pods baled, and the leaves stripped away, all in a moment. Davison had seen them in operation on Earth one summer, when he’d paid a visit to the farmlands of middlewestem America.

They had such machines on Mondarran IV, too. Lord Gabrielson had one—he was the wealthy landowner who farmed a thousand acres on the other side of the river. Lord Darnley, back the other way, had one too. But Dirk Rinehart and the other small farmers stripped their pods by hand, without complaining.

“You bend down like this and rip,” Rinehart said, demonstrating for Davison. “Then you swivel around and drop the pod in the basket behind you.”

“Doesn’t look like fun,” Davison said.

“It isn’t.” Rinehart straightened up and extended a thick, powerful, corded forearm. “This is what happens to you after a while. But hard work’s its own reward, son. Don’t ever forget it.”

Davison grinned. “Don’t worry about me, sir. I’m here to work.”

“I wasn’t accusing you, boy. Come on—take a furrow through with me, just to get the feel of it.” Rinehart strapped the harness around Davison’s shoulders, then donned his own, and together they started through the field. Overhead, the sun was high. It always seems to be noon on this planet, Davison thought, as he began to sweat.

Purple-winged flies buzzed noisily around the thick stalks of the bean-plants. Dragging the basket behind him, Davison advanced through the field, struggling to keep up with Rinehart. The older man was already ten feet ahead of him in the next furrow, ducking, bobbing, yanking, and depositing the pod in the basket, all in a smooth series of motions.

It was hard work. Davison felt his hands beginning to redden from the contact with the rough sandpaper surfaces of the plants’ leaves, and his back started to ache from the constant repetition of the unaccustomed pattern of motion. Down, up, reach around. Down, up, reach around.

He ground his teeth together and forced himself to keep going. His arm was throbbing from the exertion of using muscles that had lain unbothered for years. Sweat rolled down his forehead, crept into his collar, fell beadily into his eyebrows. His clothes seemed to be soaked through and through.

He reached the end of the furrow at last, and looked up. Rinehart was waiting there for him, arms akimbo, looking almost as cool and fresh as he had when he had begun. He was grinning.

“Tough sled, eh, Ry?”

Too winded to say anything, Davison simply nodded.

“Don’t let it get you. A couple of weeks out here, and it’ll toughen you up. I know how you city fellows are at the start.”

Davison mopped his forehead. “You wouldn’t think just pulling pods off a plant could be so rough,” he said.

“It’s tough work, and I’m not denying it,” Rinehart said. He pounded Davison affectionately on the back. “You’ll get used to it. Come on back to the house, and I’ll get you some beer.”

Davison started in as a full-time picker the next day. It was, like all the other days promised to be, hot.

The whole family was out with him—the two elder Rineharts, Janey, Bo, and Buster. Each had his own harness strapped on, with the basket behind for dropping in the pods.

“We’ll start down at the east end,” Rinehart said, and without further discussion the entire crew followed him down. Each took a furrow. Davison found himself with Janey on his left, Bo Rinehart on his right. Further down the field, he could see Dirk Rinehart already fearsomely making his way through the close-packed rows of plants, a two-legged picking machine and nothing more. He watched the older man’s effortless motions for a moment, and then, conscious that Janey and Bo were already a few steps ahead of him, he set to work.

He was wearing an open shirt and a pair of ragged trousers that he’d had since his college days. It was his most comfortable outfit. Bo was wearing a pair of jeans, no shirt; the upper part of his body, sunbronzed and heavy-muscled, gleamed brightly. Buster, the younger brother, whose body still retained some youthful chubbiness, was clad in the swim trunks that seemed to be the customary boys’ garb. Janey wore briefs and a sort of wraparound halter; Davison eyed her lean brown legs approvingly. It was an efficient farming machine, this family. He plunged into his work with a will, happy to be part of their unit.

The morning sun was still climbing in the sky, and the day had not yet reached its peak of heat, but Davison began to perspire after only a few moments of bending and yanking. He stopped to rub his sleeve over his forehead and heard light, derisive laughter come from up ahead.

Flushing hotly, he glanced up and saw Janey pausing in her furrow, hands on her hips, grinning back at him. It was much the same pose her father had taken the day before, and it irritated him. Without saying anything, he bent his head and returned to the job of picking.

A muscle at the base of his right arm began to complain. It was the business of reaching back and thrusting the picked pod into the basket that was doing it, straining the arm-socket muscles in a way they had never been used before.

Kechnie’s mocking words drifted back to him. “You don’t want your muscles to atrophy, son” They had been words spoken lightly, in jest—but, Davison now realized, they carried with themselves a certain measure of truth.

He had relied on his psi for the ordinary tasks of life, had gloried in his mastery of the power to relieve himself of a portion of everyday drudgery. Little things—things like opening doors, pulling up hassocks, moving furniture. It was simpler to teek an object than to drag it, Davison had always felt. Why not use a power, if you have it to perfection?

The answer was that he didn’t have it to perfection—yet. Perfection implied something more than utter control of objects; it meant, also, learning moderation, knowing when to use the psi and when not to.

On Earth, where it didn’t matter, he had used his power almost promiscuously. Here he didn’t dare to—and his aching muscles were paying the price of his earlier indulgence. Kechnie had known what he was doing, all right.

They reached the end of the furrow finally. Davison and Buster Rinehart came in in a dead heat for last place, and Buster didn’t even seem winded. Davison thought he caught a shred of disapproval on Rinehart’s face, as if he were disappointed at his hired hand’s performance, but he wasn’t sure. There was a definite expression of scorn on Janey’s face; her eyes, under their heavy lids, sparkled at him almost insultingly.

He glanced away, over to Rinehart, who was emptying his basket into the truck that stood in the middle of the field. “Let’s dump here before we start the next row,” he said.

The field seemed to stretch out endlessly. Davison lifted his basket with nerveless fingers and watched the gray-green pods tumble into the back of the truck. He replaced it in his harness, feeling oddly light now that the dragging weight no longer pulled down on him.

He had a fleeting thought as they moved on to the next batch of furrows: How simple it would be to teek the pods into the baskets! No more bending, no swivelling, no arms that felt like they were ready to fall off.

Simple. Sure, simple—but if Janey or Bo or any of the others should happen to turn around and see the beanpods floating mysteriously into Davison’s basket, he’d be roasting by nightfall.

Damn Kechnie, he thought savagely, and wiped a glistening bead of sweat from his face.

What had seemed like a wry joke half an hour before now hung temptingly before Davison’s eyes as as very real possibility.

He was almost an entire furrow behind the rest of them. He was disgracing himself. And his poor, unused, unathletic body was aching mercilessly.

He had the power, and he wasn’t using it. He was penning it up within himself, and it hurt. It was the scalding soup all over again; he didn’t know if it hurt more to keep bending and dragging his numb arm back up again in the blistering heat, or to pen the psi up within him until it seemed almost to be brimming out over the edges of his mind.

Davison forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, forced himself to forget the power. This is the learning process, he told himself grimly. This is growing up. Kechnie knows what he’s doing.

They reached the end of the furrow, and through a dim haze of fatigue he heard Rinehart say, “Okay, let’s knock off for a while. It’s getting too hot to work, anyway.”

He shucked off his harness and dropped it where he was, and began to walk back toward the farmhouse. With an unvoiced sigh of relief, Davison wriggled out of the leather straps and stood up straight.

He made his way across the field, noticing Janey fall in at his side. “You look pretty bushed, Ry,” she said.

“I am. Takes a while to get used to this sort of work, I guess.”

“Guess so,” the girl said. She reached out and kicked a clump of dirt. “You’ll toughen up,” she said. “Either that or you’ll fall apart. Last hired man we had fell apart. But you look like better stuff.”

“Hope you’re right,” he said, wondering who the last hired man was and what power it was that he had cooped up within himself. For some, it wouldn’t be so bad. A precog wouldn’t need a training session like this—but precogs were one in a quadrillion. Telepaths might not, either, since anyone who had tp already had such a high-voltage mind that this sort of kindergarten toilet-training was unnecessary.

It was only the garden-variety espers who needed trips to the psiless worlds, Davison thought. Telekinetics and pyrotics, and others whose simple, unspecialized powers lulled them into false security.

A new thought was entering Davison’s mind as he crossed the field, with Janey’s distracting legs flashing at his side. A normal man needed some sort of sexual release; long-enforced continence required a special kind of mind, and most men simply folded from the sustained tension.

How about a normal esper? Could he keep his power bottled up like this for five years? He was feeling the strain already, and it was just a couple of days.

Just a couple of days, Davison thought. He’d been hiding his psi only that long. Then he stopped to think how many days there were in five years, and he began to perspire afresh.

Two more days in the field toughened him to the point where each picking-session was no longer a nightmare. His body was a healthy one, and his muscles adapted without too much protest to their new regime. He could hold his own in the field now, and he felt a gratifying broadening of muscle and increase of vigor, a development of mere physical power which somehow pleased him mightily.

“Look at him eat,” Ma Rinehart commented one night at supper. “He puts it away like it’s the last meal he’s ever going to see.”

Davison grinned and shovelled down another mouthful of food. It was true; he was eating as he had never eaten before. His entire life on Earth seemed peculiarly pale and cloistered, next to this ground-hugging job on Mondarran IV. He was rounding into fine shape, physically.

But what was happening to his mind was starting to worry him.

He had the tk well under control, he thought, despite the fairly constant temptation to use it. It hurt, but he went right on living without making use of his paranormal powers. But there was a drawback developing.

Early on the fifth morning of his stay on Mondarran IV, he came awake in an instant, sitting up in bed and staring around. His brain seemed to be on fire; he blinked, driving the spots away, and climbed out of bed.

He stood there uneasily for a moment or two, wondering what had happened to him, listening to the pounding of his heart. Then he reached out, found the trousers draped over a chair, and slipped into them. He walked to the window and looked out.

It was still long before dawn. The sun was not yet gleaming on the horizon, and, high above, the twin moons moved in stately procession through the sky. They cast a glittering, icy light on the fields. Outside, it was terribly quiet.

Davison knew what had happened. It was the reaction of his tortured, repressed mind, jolting him out of sleep to scream its protest at the treatment it was receiving. You couldn’t just stop teeking, just like that. You had to taper off. That was it, thought Davison. Taper off.

He made his way down the stairs, sucking in his breath in fear every time they creaked, and left the farmhouse by the side door. He trotted lightly over the ground to the small barn that stood at the edge of the field, brimming over with picked bean pods.

Quickly, in the pre-dawn silence, he hoisted himself up the ladder and into the bam. The warm, slightly musty odor of masses of pods drifted up at him. He dropped from the ladder, landed hip-deep in pods.

Then, cautiously, he brought his tk into use. A flood of relief came over him as he teeked. He reached out, lifted a solitary pod, flipped it a few feet in the air, and let it fall back. Then another; then, two at a time. It continued for almost fifteen minutes. He revelled in the use of his power, throwing the pods merrily about.

One thing alarmed him, though. He didn’t seem to have his old facility. There was a definite effort involved in the telekinesis now, and he sensed a faint fatigue after a few moments of activity. This had never happened to him before.

The ominous thought struck him: suppose abstinence hurt his ability? Suppose five solid years of abstinence—assuming he could hold out that long—were to rob him of his power forever?

It didn’t seem likely. After all, others had gone on these five-year exiles and returned with their powers unimpaired. They had abstained—or had they? Had they been forced into some expedient such as this, forced to rise in the small hours and go behind someone’s bam to teek or to set fires?

Davison had no answers. Grimly, he teeked a few more pods into the air, and then, feeling refreshed, he climbed back out the window and down the long ladder.

Buster Rinehart was standing on the ground, looking up curiously at him.

He caught his breath sharply and continued descending.

“Hey there,” Buster said. “What you doin’ in there, Ry? Why ain’t you asleep?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Davison said, determined to bluff it out. His hands were shaking. What if Buster had spied on him, watched him using his power? Would they take a small boy’s word on so serious a charge? Probably they would, on a psiless, witch-hysterical world like this. “What are you doing out of bed, Buster? Your mother would whale you if she knew you were up and around at this hour.”

“She don’t mind,” the boy said. He held out a bucket that slopped over with greasy-looking pale worms. “I was out gettin’ fishbait. It’s the only time you can dig it, in the middle of the night with the moons shining.” He grinned confidentially up at Davison. “Now what’s your story?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I just went for a walk,” Davison said nervously, hating the necessity of defending himself in front of this boy. “That’s all.”

“That’s what I thought. Having sleepin’ troubles, eh?” Buster asked. “I know what’s the matter with you, Ry. You’re out mooning after my sister. She’s got you so crazy for her you can’t sleep. Right?”

Davison nodded immediately. “But don’t tell her, will you?” He reached in a pocket and drew out a small coin, and slipped it into the boy’s palm. Instantly the stubby fingers closed around it, and the coin vanished. “I don’t want her to know anything about the way I feel till I’ve been here a while longer,” Davison said.

“I’ll keep shut,” said the boy. His eyes sparkled in the light of the twin moons. He grasped the can of worms more tightly. He was in possession of a precious secret now, and it excited him.

“What say we go back to bed?” Davison suggested.

“I need couple of more worms. You can go, if you want to.”

“See you in the morning,” Davison said. He turned and headed back to the farmhouse, grinning wryly. The net was getting tighter, he thought. He was at the point where he had to invent imaginary romances with long-legged farm-girls in order to save his skin.

It had worked, this once. But he couldn’t risk getting out there a second time. His private teeking in the barn would have to stop. He’d need to find an outlet somewhere else.

Puzzled, he climbed back into bed and pulled the covers down tight. A few minutes later, he drifted into a troubled sleep.

When morning finally came, Davison went downstairs and confronted old Rinehart.

“Morning, Ry. What’s on your mind, son?”

“Can you spare me for today, sir? I’d like to have some free time, if it’s all right with you.”

The farmer frowned and scratched the back of one ear. “Free time? At harvest? Is it really necessary, boy? We’d like to get everything picked before season’s out. It’s going to be planting-time again soon enough, you know.”

“I know,” Davison said. “But I’d still like to have the morning free. I need to think some things out.”

“Got troubles, eh?” Rinehart said sympathetically. He shrugged. “Okay, Ry. I’m no slave-driver. Take the morning off, if you want. You can make up the time on Sunday.”

“Fair enough,” Davison said.

The heat was just beginning as he trudged away from the Rinehart farm and down to the muddy swimming-hole at the far end of their land. He skirted it and headed on into the thick forest that separated their land from that of wealthy Lord Gabrielson.

He struck out into the forest, which was delightfully cool. Thick-boled, redleaved trees stood arrayed in a closely-packed stand of what looked like virgin timber; the soil was dark and fertile looking, and a profusion of wild vegetation spread heavily over the ground. Above, there was the chittering of colorful birds, and occasionally a curious bat-winged creature fluttered from branch to branch of the giant trees.

He knew why he was on Mondarran IV: to learn moderation. To learn to handle his power. That much was clear. But how was he going to survive?

The religious setup here was one of jealous orthodoxy, it seemed, and the moral code made no allowance for any deviatory abilities. Psi meant witchcraft—a common equation, apparently, on these backwater psiless worlds. The farmers here had little contact with the more sophisticated planets from which they had sprung, ten or twenty centuries before, and somehow they had reached a point of cultural equilibrium that left no room for psi.

That meant Davison would have to suppress his power. Only—he couldn’t suppress it. Five days of watchful self-control and he was half out of his mind from the strain. And what if he ran into a position where he had to use his psi or be killed? Suppose that tree over there were to fall directly on him; he could push it away, but what would that avail if someone were watching—someone who would cry “Witch!”

Yet men had come to Mondarran IV and returned, and survived. That meant they had found the way. Davison threaded further on into the forest, trying to arrange his thoughts coherently.

The forest, he thought, was a pleasant place, not at all like the fly-bitten farmland beyond. The curtain of trees effectively screened out the searching beams of the sun, and down at shrub-level it was a cool, sweet-smelling, silent world.

He glanced up ahead. A winding river trickled softly through the trees. And, it seemed to him, up ahead a blue curl of smoke rose up over the bushes. Was someone using a fire there?

Cautiously, he tiptoed forward, cursing every time his foot cracked a twig. After a few tense moments, he rounded a bend in the path and discovered where the fire was coming from.

Squatting at the edge of the river, holding a pan in one hand, was Dumb Joe—the beggar he had encountered on the road from the spaceport. The beggar was still clad in his tattered leather outfit, and he seemed to be roasting a couple of fish over a small fire.

Grinning in relief, Davison came closer. And then the grin vanished, and he stood in open-jawed astonishment.

Dumb Joe was roasting fish, all right. But there wasn’t any fire—except for the radiation that seemed to be streaming from his fingertips.

Dumb Joe was a pyrotic.

Davison hung in midstride, frozen in amazement. Dumb Joe, a filthy, ignorant half-imbecile of a beggar, was casually squatting in the seclusion of the forest, psionically cooking a couple of fish for breakfast. A little further up the bank, Davison saw a rudely-constructed shack which was evidently Dumb Joe’s home.

The answer to the whole thing flooded through his mind instantly. It made perfect sense.

It was impossible to live in Mondarran society with a psi power and survive the full five years. It was too hard to keep from unintentional uses of power, and the strains attendant on the whole enterprise were too great for most men to stand.

But one could live alongside society—as a wandering hobo, perhaps, frying fish in the forest—and no one would notice, no one would be on hand to see your occasional practice of psi. No one would suspect a flea-ridden tramp of being a witch. Of course not!

Davison took another step forward, and started to say something to Dumb Joe. But Dumb Joe looked up at the sound of the footstep. He spotted Davison standing some twenty feet away, glared angrily at him, and let the pan of fish drop to the ground. Reaching down to his hip, he whipped out a mirror-surfaced hunting knife, and without the slightest hesitation sent it whistling straight at Davison.

In the brief flashing instant after the knife left Dumb Joe’s hand, a thought tore through Davison’s mind. Dumb Joe would have to be an Earthman like himself, serving his five-year stay out on Mondarran. And therefore it wasn’t necessary to hide his own psi power from him, wasn’t necessary to let the blade strike—

Davison whisked the knife aside and let it plant itself to the hilt in the soft earth near his foot. He stooped, picked it up, and glanced at Dumb Joe.

“You—teeked it away,” the beggar said, almost incredulously. “You’re not a spy!”

Davison smiled. “No. I’m a tk. And you’re a pyrotic!”

A slow grin crept over Dumb Joe’s stubblebearded face. He crossed the ground to where Davison was standing, and seized his hand. “You’re an Earthman. A real Earthman,” he said exultantly, in a half whisper.

Davison nodded. “You too?”

“Yes,” Dumb Joe said. “I’ve been here three years, and you’re the first I’ve dared speak to. All the others I’ve seen have been burned.”

“All of them?” Davison asked.

“I didn’t mean that,” Dumb Joe said. “Actually hardly any get burned. The Guild doesn’t lose as many men as you might think. But the ones I’ve known about got roasted. I didn’t dare approach those I wasn’t sure about. You’re the first—and you saw me first. I shouldn’t have been so careless, but no one ever comes out this way but me.

“Or another crazy Earthman,” Davison said.

He didn’t dare to spend much time with Dumb Joe—whose real name, he discovered, was Joseph Flanagan, formerly of Earth.

In their hurried conversation in the forest, Flanagan explained the whole thing to him. It was a perfectly logical development. Apparently a great many of the Earthmen sent to such planets adopted the guise of a tramp, and moved with shambling gait and rolling eyes from one village to another, never staying anywhere too long, never tipping their hands as to the power they possessed.

They could always slip off to the forest and use their power privately, to relieve the strain of abstinence. It didn’t matter. No one was watching them; no one expected them to be witches. It was perfect camouflage.

“We’d better go,” Flanagan said. “It isn’t safe, even this way. And I want to last out my remaining two years. Lord, it’ll be good to take baths again regularly!”

Davison grinned. “You’ve really got it figured,” he said.

“It’s the simplest way,” said Flanagan. “You can’t bat your head against the wall forever. I tried living in the village, the way you’re doing. I almost cracked inside a month, maybe less. You can’t come down to their level and hope to survive; you’ve got to get below their level, where they don’t expect to find witches. Then they’ll leave you alone.”

Davison nodded in agreement. “That makes sense.”

“I’ll have to go now,” said Flanagan. He allowed his muscles to relax, adopted the crooked gait and the character of Dumb Joe again, and without saying goodbye began to straggle off further into the forest. Davison stood there for a while, watching him go, and then turned and started back the way he came.

He had an answer now, he thought.

But by the time he had emerged from the forest and felt the noonday sun beating down, he wasn’t so sure. Kechnie had once told him, “Don’t run away ” He hadn’t explained—but now Davison knew what he meant.

Dumb Joe Flanagan would last out his five years with a minimum of effort, and when he returned he would get his release and become a member of the Guild. But had he really accomplished his goal to the fullest? Not really, Davison told himself. It wouldn’t be possible for him to hide as a beggar forever; sometime, somewhere, it would be necessary for him to function as a member of society, and then Flanagan’s five years of shambling would do him little good.

There had to be some other way, Davison thought fiercely. Some way to stick out the five years without burying his head like an ostrich. Some way that would leave him fit to return to society, or to live in some psiless society, and still have his psi power under firm control.

He strode through the hot fields. Off in the distance, he could see the Rinehart family finishing up a furrow. It was noon, and they would be knocking off now. As he looked, he saw sturdy Dirk Rinehart finish his furrow and empty his pods into the waiting truck, and before he had come within shouting distance the rest of them had done so too, and were standing around relaxing after a hard morning’s work.

“Well, look who’s back!” Janey exclaimed, as Davison drew near. “Have a nice morning’s relaxation?”

“I did some heavy thinking, Janey,” Davison said mildly. “And I’ll be making up my time on Sunday, while you’re resting. It balances out.”

Old Rinehart came over, smiling. “All thought out, youngster? I hope so, because there’s a rough afternoon’s work waiting for us.”

“I’ll be with you,” Davison said. He clamped his lips together, not listening to what they were saying, wondering only where the way out might lie.

“Hey, look at me,” called a piping voice from behind him.

“Put those down!” Dirk Rinehart ordered sternly. “Get down from there before you break your neck!”

Davison turned and saw Buster Rinehart, standing upon the cab of the truck. He had some bean pods in his hands, and he was energetically juggling them through the air. “Look at me!” he yelled again, evidently proud of his own acrobatic skill “I’m juggling!”

A moment later he lost control of the pods. They fell and scattered all over the ground. A moment later, the boy was yowling in pain as his father’s palm administered punishment vigorously.

Davison chuckled. Then he laughed louder, as he realized what had happened.

He had his answer at last.

Davison gave notice at the end of the week, after working particularly hard in the field. He felt a little guilty about quitting just before planting time, and he had grown to like the Rineharts more than a little. But it was necessary to pull out and move on.

He told Dirk Rinehart he would go after another week had elapsed, and though the farmer had obviously not been pleased by the news, he made no protest. When his week was up, Davison left, gathering his goods together in his suitcase and departing by foot.

He needed to cover quite a distance—far enough from the village so that no one would trace him. He hired one of the nearby farmers’ sons to drive him to the next town, giving him one of his remaining coins to do so. Folded in his hip pocket was the crumpled wad of bills that was his salary for his stay at Rinehart’s, above room and board. He didn’t want to touch that money at all.

The boy drove him through the flat, monotonous Mondarran countryside to another town only slightly larger than the first, and otherwise almost identical.

“Thanks,” Davison said simply, got out, and started to walk. He entered the town—it, too, had its witch-pole—and started looking around for a place to live. He had many preparations to tend to before he would be ready.

Six months later, the signs started to appear all over the local countryside. They were gaudy, printed in three colors, bright and eye-catching. They said, simply,

It caused a stir. As Davison drove his gilded, ornate chariot into the first town on his itinerary, the rambling village on the far side of Lord Gabrielson’s domain, a crowd gathered before him and preceded him down the main street, shouting and whooping. It wasn’t every day of the year that a travelling magician came to town.

He drove solemnly behind them down the wide street, turned the chariot around, and parked it almost in front of the steel witch-pole. He set the handbrakes, lowered the little platform on which he was going to perform, and stepped out, resplendent in his red-and-gold costume with billowing cloak, in full view of the crowd. He saw a little ripple of anticipation run through them at his appearance.

A tall yokel in the front called out, “Are you the presti—prestig—the whatever you are?”

“I am Marius the Prestidigitator, indeed,” Davison said in a sepulchral voice. He was enjoying it.

“Well, just what do you do, Mr. Marius?” the yokel replied.

Davison grinned. This was better than having a shill or a trained stooge in the crowd. “Young man, I perform feats that stagger the imagination, that astound the mind, that topple reality.” He waved his arms over his head in a wild, grandiose gesture. “I can call spirits from the vasty deep!” he thundered. “I hold the secrets of life and death!”

“That’s what all you magicians say,” someone drawled boredly from the back of the crowd. “Let’s see you do something, before we have to pay!”

“Very well, unbeliever!” Davison roared. He reached behind himself, drew forth a pair of wax candles, struck a match, and lit the candles. “Observe the way I handle these tapers,” he said sonorously. “Notice that I handle the fiery flames without experiencing the slightest harm.”

He hefted the candles, tossed them aloft, and began to rotate them telekinetically so that whenever they came down, it was the unlit end he grasped. He juggled the two candles for a moment or two, then reached back, drew forth a third, and inserted it into the rotation. He remained that way for a moment, and the crowd grew silent as Davison tottered around under the candles, pretending to be having all sorts of difficulties. Finally, when the wax became too pliable to handle easily, he teeked the candles down and caught them. He waved them aloft. The crowd responded with a tinkle of coins.

“Thank you, thank you,” he said. He pulled out a box full of colored globes, and began to juggle them without prologue. Within a few seconds he had five of them going at once—actually manipulated by tk, while he waved his hands impressively but meaninglessly beneath them. He sent up a sixth, then a seventh.

He smiled pleasantly to himself as he juggled. Quite possibly these people had encountered telekinetics before, and had burned them for witches. But those were real telekinetics; he was only a sleight-of-hand artist, a man of exceptional coordination, a wandering charlatan—a fake. Everyone knew magicians were phonies, and that it was by tricky fingerwork that he kept all those globes aloft.

When the shower of coins had stopped, he caught the balls and restored them to their box. He began a new trick—one which involved a rapid line of patter while he set up an elaborate balancing stunt. Piling chairs on top of thin planks and adding odd pieces of furniture from the back of his chariot to make the edifice even more precarious, he assembled a balanced heap some twelve feet high. He ran round it rapidly, ostensibly guiding it with his hands, actually keeping the woodpile under a firm tk control.

Finally he was satisfied with the balance. He began to climb slowly. When he reached the uppermost chair—balanced crazily on one of its legs alone—he climbed up, braced himself, and, by teeking against the ground, lifted himself and balanced for a long moment by one hand. Then he swung down, leaped lightly to the ground, and waved one hand in triumph. A clatter of coins resulted.

This was the way, he thought, as the crowd roared its approval. They’d never suspect he was using a sort of real magic. He could practice control of his psi in ordinary life, and this charlatanry would give him the needed outlet as well. When he returned to Earth, he’d be adjusted, more so than the ones like Dumb Joe. Davison was remaining in society. He wasn’t running away.

A small boy in the first row stood up. “Aw, I know how you did that,” he shouted derisively. “It was just a trick. You had it all—”

“Don’t give the show away, sonny,” Davison interrupted in a loud stage whisper. “Let’s just keep these things secret—between us magicians, huh?”

Illustrated by Virgil Finlay