* * * * *

The words from Mersey's throat had come falteringly at first, but now
they were strong, although the tone was flat and expressionless. The
words went on:

"But we can't control. I've tried and failed. At best we can co-exist,
as observers and vicarious participants, but we must surrender choice.
Is that to be our destiny--to live on, but to be denied all except
contemplation--to live on as guests among you, accepting your ways and
sharing them, but with no power to change them?"

The traveler shouted at Mersey's mind in soundless fury: "Shut up!
Shut up!"

Mersey stopped talking.

"Go on," said the doctor softly. "This is very interesting."

"Shut up!" said the traveler voicelessly, yet with frantic urgency.

The madman was silent. His body was perfectly still, except for his
calm breathing. The visitor gazed through his eyes in the only
possible direction--up at the ceiling. He tried another command. "Look
at the doctor."

With that glance, the visitor told himself, he would flee the crazed
mind and enter the doctor's. There he would learn what the
psychiatrist thought of his patient's strange soliloquy--whether he
believed it, or any part of it.

He prayed that the doctor was evaluating it as the intricate raving of
delusion.

* * * * *

Slowly, Mersey turned his head. Through his eyes, the visitor saw the
faded green carpet, the doctor's dull-black shoes, his socks, the legs
of his trousers. Mersey's glance hovered there, around the doctor's
knees. The visitor forced it higher, past the belt around a tidy
waist, along the buttons of the opened vest to the white collar, and
finally to the kindly eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses.

Again he had commanded this human being and had been obeyed. The
traveler braced himself for the leap from the tortured mind to the
sane one.

But his gaze continued to be that of Mersey.

The gray eyes of the doctor were on his patient. Intelligence and
kindness were in those eyes, but the visitor could read nothing else.

He was caught, a prisoner in a demented mind. He felt panic. This must
be the mind-screen he'd been warned about.

"Look down," the visitor commanded Mersey. "Shut your eyes. Don't let
him see me."

But Mersey continued to be held by the doctor's eyes. The visitor
cowered back into the crazed mental tangle.

Gradually, then, his fear ebbed. There was more likelihood that Cloyd
did not