Time Thieves

you only have to open your mind and seek others who are seeking. You are not blind, cold creatures hunting warmth and bypassing it by inches more often than you find it.”
        
        “And your people are-sealed off from each other.”
        
        “More than sealed off. In different worlds, side-by-side but farther apart than one star from another.”
        
        It could not understand loneliness and never would. The politin changed its tact. “How will you escape the ship?”
        
        “We will find our way.”
        
        “It is buried deep inside the mountain.”
        
        “In a cavern,” Pete corrected. “I learned that earlier. You could juggle molecules to move it through solid earth, but you couldn't suspend it in other matter indefinitely. We'll get from the ship into the cavern, find other caves that lead to the surface. The mountain has many limestone sinkholes in its depressions. We'll probably go out through one.”
        
        “But you-”
        
        He struck out, suddenly weary, and ended the politin's existence.
        

----

    XX
        
        
        For Della, for love.
        
        He stood above her in another room of the politin scout ship. She was asleep, and she was dreaming. Now and then, the corners of her sensuous mouth turned up in some secret smile that delighted him.
        
        The events of the last few weeks had been predetermined by his love for Della. He had bought the cabin and had been working on it, in the first place, because she liked bow-and-arrow hunting more than he did and had hinted at the fun their own cabin would be. When he had rounded Jagger's Curve, going to that cabin, and had been killed in his plunge down the mountainside, the affair could have ended no way but this. His love for her had always narrowed his prerogatives, had funneled him to this moment and to this possible future that had now become the probable one. He had not understood this fundamental condition of his life until just moments ago, when they had threatened to drive her temporarily mad and when it looked as if he would lose his telepathic key to her inner mind. But then he had understood, and he had acted with a vengeance.
        
        When he returned from his first period of amnesia, it was his love for her which had made him inquisitive about his stolen days. On his second return, after the follow-up period of amnesia, it had been his need to reassure her and to erase the possibility of infidelity from her mind which had driven him back to examine his memories of the Emerald Leaf Motel. He had loved her, and he had gone back to the house to rescue her from the mechanical men when she had been a captive there. He had loved her, and he had refused to surrender the telepathic powers which he could use to make her life more full. He had loved her, and he had killed for her. Four times.
        
        He looked into his own mind and found no regret. He would murder four times again, if necessary, to preserve their chance at complete love through telepathic communion. A hundred times, a thousand. Loneliness was the key word and his weapon. When he had destroyed the quartet of politin minds, he had not merely struck them down with unformed bolts of psychic energy. He had been afraid that alone would not be equal to the task. He had, instead, reached into the most private regions of his own soul, had dredged up the loneliness of youth, the loneliness he had known before he had met Della, and he had struck them with that. They could never have fielded such a pitch. It was gunshot directed at a primitive savage who could never understand the source of the thing which had done him in. But, if there were no regret now, it would come later. A great deal of it. And he would need Della's deepest understanding to help himself weather it.
        
        In time, man would be as the politin were now. He would forget his loneliness and bask in telepathic unity with his fellows. His only fear would be death, the last loneliness there was. And then he would mourn these four alien deaths.
        
        And will I be the hero then? Pete wondered. Or will I be the last villain?
        
        The alien chamber felt terribly cold.
        
        He reached into Della's mind.
        
        He passed over the things she feared. In time, she would cease to fear them.
        
        He touched, instead, on