s," the Registrar said. "We can request your
withdrawal from the school, or we can keep you here under observation
and give you an exhaustive battery of tests. The decision is in your
hands."

"_ ... Geria of Bortinot questions your mentality...._"

"_ ... the decision is in your hands._"

Jorak moved, slipped along the wall. His face was sneering and fearful
too. The purple mask of his face seemed to swim before Smith's eyes like
something seen through watered glass. Smith was pacing. He felt the
emotions beginning to work yeastily and he longed to take that face and
twist it off its snaky neck.

"You had better go back to Earth, Smith," Jorak said. "Wherever it is."

Abruptly, Smith felt the tendons writhing between his hands. He lifted.
He held the squirming figure off the floor, held it there and looked
into it curiously.

"You'd better use some of your psi-power, my little green friend," Smith
said, "While you can."

The green face was turning purple. Words choked off somewhere down in
the tubular length of the neck. Smith could feel it now! He could feel
it! And he knew. The desperate tendrils of psi-power flailing out. And
Smith began to smile.

"I could tell you some things, Jorak. You have some psi-power, but that
and anything else you've got, including some very bad features, you got
them all from Earth. You got the germs for it all a long time back. And
what you have left is just something that's a kind of left-over after a
few thousand years. The Earth has forgotten more psi-power, friend, than
you'll ever have."

Jorak's eyes popped. Veins were coloring thickly through them.

"You're here to learn something, Jorak. Listen. We developed psi-power
on Earth so long ago we don't bother remembering when it was."

Smith felt the power all right. Latent psi-power, dormant and unused and
unneeded and uninteresting for aeons.

He threw Jorak into the corner. Jorak curled up there, sucking in air
and rubbing his bruised neck.

"We had it. We threw it away," Smith said. "We had a defense against it
too. But we don't use psi, or the defense anymore. We outgrew it. It had
its day and then we forgot about it, Jorak. Why? We lost interest.
Individual sanctity was better. Privacy of the human mind was something
a lot more to be desired than being able to pry into someone else's
brain, or vice versa. But you take a lot of pride, Jorak, in having a
little residue floating around."

Smith grinned more widely