ore, he went
directly to a security officer.

"I'm worried about the boy Fran, who ran away," he observed. "Can you
tell me what happened?"

"I'd like somebody to tell me!" said the security officer morbidly. "If
he ran, he had wings on his shoes. And now he's out he's got me scared!
You know those telepathic gadgets in the belts the children wore? We
took 'em away. We opened one of 'em up, but we left the others in
working order. We tried them. When two men wear them, with both turned
on, they sort of half-way read each other's minds. Each man knows what
the other is doing and seeing. But one man by himself can't do a thing.
Two men can do a lot. It's been suggested that if they knew the trick of
it, three men could do all the telepathy they wanted, read minds and all
that. We haven't found out the trick, though."

* * * * *

Soames nodded, marvelling at the ability of the human race to find
reasons to believe anything it wanted to, whether for sweet vanity's
sake or for the sake of scaring itself to death.

"When we first got the belts from the kids," pursued the security
officer, "we figured there might be some other folks of the kids' race
on Earth, figuring on ways to get 'em loose. We had a belt worn night
and day. Nothing. So we stopped monitoring. Then this Fran got away and
we started monitoring all over again, trying to pick up any working of
belts like these that we didn't know about. And we started picking up
stuff right away!"

* * * * *

Soames stared. Zani'd been using one such instrument.

"A man's got one of those belts on," said the security man, frowning,
"and it's like he didn't. Nothing happens at all. But after maybe hours,
maybe a day or two, suddenly, with his eyes closed, he sees a page of
outlandish writing. The kind of writing those kids do. It can't be
photographed, because it's only inside your head that you see it. You
can't make sense of it. The alphabet isn't ours. The words are the
language they talk among themselves. I figure there's a ship somewhere,
broadcasting a call to the kids. The call's printed. If the kids had
their belts on, and turned on, they could read it. But we got their
belts. So this Fran, he broke away to try to make some kind of way to
answer that call!"

Soames said nothing. But he was unhappily amused, at himself as well as
the security officer. He'd gone to some pains to tell Gail how the
chi