a Controller,
Reinhardt?"

The Prussian smiled. "Ever since you first tried to probe me.
Fortunately, my training enabled me to put up a shield that you couldn't
penetrate; I seemed like a Normal to you.

"I kept you on because I knew you'd be useful in cracking Lasser and his
gang when the time came. No one else could have done what you did that
night."

"Thanks," Houston said sincerely. "What's going to happen now? After I
get well, I mean."

"You'll do what the others have done. A little plastic surgery to change
your face a trifle, a little record-juggling to give you a new identity,
and you'll be ready to go back to work for the PD Police.

"If anyone recognizes you, it's easy to take over their minds just long
enough to make them forget. We allow that much Controlling."

"And then what?" Houston wanted to know. "What happens in the long run?"

"In a way," said Reinhardt, "your friend Sager was right. The
Controllers will eventually become the rulers of Earth. But not by force
or trickery. We must just bide our time. More and more of us are being
born all the time; the Normals are becoming fewer and fewer. Within a
century, we will outnumber them--we will be the Normals, not they.

"But they'll never know what's going on. The last Normal will die
without ever knowing that he is in a world of telepaths.

"By the time that comes about, we'll no longer need the Penal Cluster,
since Controllers will be born into a world where there is no fear of
non-telepaths."

"I wonder," Houston mused, "I wonder how this ability came about. Why is
the human race acquiring telepathy so suddenly?"

Reinhardt shrugged. "I can give you many explanations--atomic radiation,
cosmic rays, natural evolution. But none of them really explains it.
They just make it easier to live with.

"I think something similar must have happened a few hundred thousand
years ago, when Cro-Magnon man, our own ancestors, first developed true
intelligence instead of the pseudo-intelligence, the highly developed
instincts, of the Neanderthals and other para-men.

"Within a relatively short time, the para-men had died out, leaving the
Cro-Magnon, with his true intelligence, to rule Earth."

Reinhardt stood up. "Why is it happening? We don't know. Maybe we never
will know, any more than we know why Man developed intelligence." He
shrugged. "Perhaps the only explanation we'll ever have is to call it
the Will of God and let it go at that."

"Maybe