* * *

He did so. At first it was no different from the contact he had had with
Shearing's mind, or with Christina's before on the _Happy Dream_.
Thoughts came to him clearly phrased--_You want to know why we built the
ship, what we plan to do with it_--and it was only after some time that
he realized the words had stopped and he was receiving Christina's
emotions, her memories and opinions, her disappointments and her dreams,
as simply and directly as though they were his own.

You haven't had time yet, they told him without words, to realize how
alone you are. You haven't tried, as most of us do at first, to be human
again, to fit yourself into life as though the gap of time was not
there, as though nothing had changed. You haven't watched people getting
old around you while you have hardly added a gray hair. You haven't had
to move from one place to another, one job, one group of friends to
another, because sooner or later they sense something wrong about you.
You haven't had to hide your new powers as you would hide a disease
because people would fear and hate you, perhaps even kill you, if they
knew. That's why there is a brotherhood. And that's why we built the
ship.

Symbol of flight. Symbol of freedom. A universe wide beyond imagining,
thronging with many colored guns, with new worlds where men in a human
society could build a society of their own. _No boundaries beyond which
the mind cannot dare to go. All space, all time, all knowledge--free!_

Once more he saw those wide dark seas between the suns. His mind raced
with hers through the cold-flaming nebulae, wheeled blinded and stunned
past the hiving stars of Hercules, looked in eager fascination at the
splendid spiral of Andromeda--no longer, perhaps, beyond reach, for what
are time and space to the intangible forces of the mind?

Then that wild flight ceased, and instead there was a smaller vision,
misty and only half realized, of houses and streets, a place where they
could live and be what they were, openly and without fear.

_Can you understand now_, she asked him, _what they would think if they
knew about the ship? Can you understand that they would be afraid to
have us colonizing out there, afraid of what we might do?_

He understood. At the very least, if the truth were known, the Lazarites
would never be free again. They would be taken and tested and examined
and lectured about, legislated over, restricted, governed, and used.