ng.

Fran dragged fiercely at his arm. His eyes burned. He thrust something
upon Soames and frantically repeated the one word of his scanty English
vocabulary which seemed to fit. The word was, "Try! Try! Try!" He
reached around Soames' waist and linked a belt about him.

Soames had the abrupt conviction that he was going mad. He stood,
himself, in the studio where the tumult was now almost ended. But he
looked up at himself from the level of his own breast. Also he was down
in the lobby of the Communications Building, mingling with the thinning
mob there, allowing himself to be shepherded out into the street. There
he was surrounded by people taller than himself. That part of his
awareness reached the open air and moved swiftly westward. That part of
him put his hand in his pocket--but Soames had nothing to do with the
action--and felt things there. There was a chain with sharp-edged,
faceted things on it. There was a belt with shaped metallic objects
fastened to it....

"Try!" cried Fran desperately. "Try!"

And suddenly Soames realized. He heard the street-sounds through someone
else's ears. He saw the street through someone else's eyes.
Simultaneously he saw himself in the studio through someone else's eyes,
Fran's. And this explained the behavior of the children with puppies and
English lessons and items of information which all of them seemed to
know when one knew. The children were not telepathic. They could not
read each other's minds. But some one or all of the decorative squares
and circles on their belts enabled them to share each other's
sense-impressions. They were both broadcasters and receivers of sensory
impressions. And therefore it was because Soames had Mal's belt about
him that he could see what Fran saw, and hear what Fran heard, and also
he saw and heard and felt what an oily-haired member of the Toppers saw
and heard and felt with Hod's belt in his pocket beside Linda Beach's
necklace, snatched from her neck even before the camera.

But there was no sign that the oily-haired person saw or heard or felt
what Soames did. Perhaps because he was not wearing the belt, but only
had it crumpled together in his pocket.

"Right!" said Soames harshly. "I'll get it back!"

He plunged toward the studio door. There had been Secret Service men
assigned to guard the children. Soames caught one of them by the
shoulder.

"The kids have been robbed," he snapped in the Secret Service man's ear.
"Secret dev