Time Thieves

corner of his own mind. This gave him the opportunity to think about the telepathic talent that he had acquired. He was naturally lead to a series of questions, all of them unanswerable, which kept running through his mind like a tape loop, over and over again. How had he acquired this ability? How was it connected to his periods of amnesia? Did the stranger who had been catching him have anything to do with it? Was it connected to the eerie sense of time-space distortion which he had undergone a few days ago in the stairwell of the Porter-Mullion building? Would this strange new ability lead to another bout with amnesia, as that distorted time-space sense had?
        
        Now, he explored the mind of a nine-year-old boy, fascinated by the unbounded realm of fantasy he found there. In such a mind, all things were possible, all dreams recognizable, all goals within grasp. Simultaneously, he considered the tape loop of questions, so occupied between the two endeavours that he was not aware of the first stirrings of the alien mind which had intruded into his. At first, there was only a sudden calming influence, a sense of barrenness. Then the hard, clean mind weighed him down. He felt cold and hollow, drained by the contact. The child's thoughts ebbed. The alien consciousness flowed, filling his horizons until it commanded all his attention.
        
        He looked about the dark streets. Arc lamps glowed at intervals; the branches of elms cast weird shadows on the sidewalks. Still, he could see that no one else was about.
        
        Tentatively, he examined the odd consciousness. It was a mind of sorts, though not like any he had pried open before. It was smooth, completely featureless. It was a dazzling white, though it did not glint with light. It was cold, like a ball of compressed frost.
        
        He insisted on finding a chink in it. He could not.
        
        “Who are you?” he asked.
        
        It did not reply. He was certain that the lack of response was not indicative of a lack of ability. Whoever this was, he did not want to respond, aware that silence would continue to give him the upper hand.
        
        “What do you want?”
        
        If it wanted anything, it did not say.
        
        He enveloped it with mental fingers and found a thin filament of thought trailing away behind it. He tested the strand and found bright images that made little sense in their severe compression. This cold mind was somehow joined to another consciousness. Pete permitted his telepathic probe to float outwards upon this tenuous thread, building speed until, abruptly, he had plunged into a mind that he had not been expecting at all.
        
        He looked out at the world through two amber patches that registered light in the highest and lowest spectrums and sensed heat and cold as well.
        
        His eyes somehow translated sound, for he had no ears.
        
        He worked his toothless and lipless mouth and felt rows of gums wriggle like bloodless snakes.
        
        He raised an eight-fingered hand and touched some control in a board before him.
        
        That was all he could endure. Instantly, he fled backwards to the first, featureless mind that contained no thoughts of its own. From there, he settled completely into his own body and thrust the alien consciousness from his mind. The alabaster sphere dwindled and was gone.
        
        Ahead, on the sidewalk, a tall man appeared. He was dressed in black slacks, a dark shirt and dark topcoat. As the man approached, Pete could see that it was the same stranger who had been watching him the past several days.
        
        “Who are you?” he asked again.
        
        He received the silence that he had expected for his answer.
        
        They were only a hundred feet apart now.
        
        Pete tested the stranger's mind and encountered the white sphere and the cold, the apparent absence of mental processes. There was only the filament, stretching back to the eyeless creature, and he did not want to follow that a second time.
        
        He withdrew his psionic fingers.
        
        Fifty feet of sidewalk separated them.
        
        The stranger's hands hung at his sides. He had no weapon in them. And though his manner was relaxed and not particularly threatening, he seemed to radiate danger.
        
        Five feet