Time Thieves

the desk, he stopped, for he had begun to wonder where he was going.
        
        His moment of doubt allowed the tide of strange thoughts to overwhelm him once again. It was almost a physical battering now; every joint in his body ached.
        
        “Let me alone,” he said.
        
        But they didn't.
        
        “Help.”
        
        But there was none.
        
        His mind was filled with a thousand consciousnesses now, though none of them were aware of him. As one or another of the consciousnesses became momentarily dominant, boiling to the surface of that mental cauldron, he was swept away into another body, behind another pair of eyes. He knew that he was only reading the very vivid conscious thoughts of those people in the nearby blocks of town, but he felt as if he were actually teleporting into other bodies.
        
        He was a man named Bill Harvey, sitting at his white formica kitchen table, reading one of his son's comic books and sipping warm milk in hopes of shrugging off insomnia as he-
        
        -became a man at a window, looking through the slats of a Venetian blind that the woman beyond had carelessly left open. His name was Dunsy Harriman, twenty-seven years old, employed as an apprentice baker, unmarried, guilt-ridden. He pressed his face against the cool glass to see her and-
        
        -was abruptly Peter Mullion, clutching at the door of his den, desperate for the corridor beyond.
        
        It had occurred to him that, if he could somehow reach the garage and the car, and if he could drive without killing himself, the thoughts might dwindle in volume as he put space between himself and the minds that produced them.
        
        In the corridor, he fell.
        
        -and was, abruptly, a man named Leonard, lying on the yellow tile of the bathroom floor, listening to his heart explode, feeling himself die, thinking that sixty-seven was much too young, much too young, much too, much too-
        
        -and Pete pushed the floor away, stood there in the hall and tried to think.
        
        On the horizon of his mind, he began receiving the output of at least ten thousand more minds. If the others had descended on him like bees, these came like locust. They blackened the sky, swarmed down, filmed over him, and carried him away in the static-laden cacophony of all their hopes and dreams, miseries' and jubilations.
        
        There was quiet, then.
        
        He had been lying on the hall floor for more than half an hour; the last ten minutes, he had been conscious. All the whispers were gone, except for the closest one, Della's. He had not tried to rise; his legs were still weak and trembling. Instead, he listened to Della's innermost ramblings, and he taught himself how to delve into the hidden corners of her mind, down into the subconscious where the most interesting fragments were to be found. He began to know her better than ever before, and he felt his chest grow tight with the emotion generated by this new intimacy.
        
        In time, afraid that he could not take any more of this psychologically shattering experience in his first session, he eased her sleep-threaded thoughts out of his conscious mind. It was easy to control the input now; it was as if he had always known what methods to use. Della's murmurs faded into silence. While he slept, his mind had evidently learned how to channel the inpouring mental images. In the blessed silence, he struggled to his feet and went quietly upstairs, where he changed into jeans and a work shirt.
        
        In the kitchen, he wrote a message on the blackboard lest she wake up, find him missing, and be frightened that amnesia had again taken him. He opened the back door, stepped into the garage, went from there to the rear lawn, then walked out to the street.
        
        He was anxious to test his new powers. The longer he could keep himself occupied with them, the longer he could put off wondering where they had come from.
        

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    VII
        
        
        For an hour, he wandered the streets of the town, hesitating before certain houses and calling forth the thoughts of their inhabitants. The longer he explored the minds of others, the easier it became, until he was soon able to contain another person's thoughts without yielding his own grasp of reality and without being forced into a small