Galaxy Magazine (May 1952) by Galaxy

Author:Galaxy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1952-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

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84

GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION

whispering rustle of her robe.

He gulped down coffee and stood up to leave,

Fll eat lunch around . . .

/ know. Her thought cut into his, mildly commanding. He grinned a little to himself as he headed down the hall. Her tele-pathed message had come with an almost motherlike chiding.

Then, crossing the grounds, he recalled the dream again and the departing grin emptied his features of amusement.

All morning he wondered irritably what made the Gnee men so stupid. If they dropped a bundle, it was a project to pick it up again. They're like brainless cows, he thought, watching them through the office windows as they plodded through their tasks, eyes dull and unblinking, their thick shoulders sloping inward.

He knew definitely now that they weren't telepathic. He'd tried several times to give them orders with his mind alone and there was no receipt of message. They reacted only to loudly repeated words of two syllables or, preferably, less. And they reacted moronieally at that.

In the middle of the morning he looked up from the backlog of paper work that Corrigan had left and realized, with some shock, that her thoughts were reaching him all the way from the house.

And yet they weren't thoughts he could translate into words. They were just sensations, amor* phously present. He got the feeling that she was checking, sending out exploratory beams now and again to see if all was well with him.

The first few times it did no more than amuse him: he chuckled softly and went back to his work,.

But then the proddings assumed an annoyingly regular time pattern and he began to squirm in his chair. He found himself becoming rigidly erect and anticipating them seconds before they came.

By late morning he was repulsing them consciously, tossing his pen on the desk and ordering her angrily to leave him alone when he worked. Her thoughts would break off contritely—and soon come back agairt, like creeping things that stole upon him, insinuating and beyond insult.

His nerves began to fray a little. He left the office and prowled the warehouse floor, tearing open bundles and checking goods with impatient fingers. The thoughts followed him around faithfully,

"How doody," said the Gnee foreman every time Lindell passed, making him angrier yet.

Once he straightened up suddenly over a bundle artd said

LOVER WHEN YOU'RE NEAR ME

85

sb^,*

loudly, "Go away!"

The foreman jumped a foot in the air. His pencil and clipboard went flying, and he hid behind a pillar and looked fearfully at LindelL

Lindell pretended not to notice.

LATER, back in the office, he sat thinking, the jopen log book before him.

No wonder the Gnee men didn't

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telepath, he thought. They knew what was good for them.

Then he looked out the window at the plodding line of workers.

What if they weren't just avoiding telepathy? What if they were incapable of it; had once held the ability and, because of it, hqfi been broken to their present state of witless stolidity?

He thought of what Martin had said about the women outnumbering the men.

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