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But a half-conscious Controller sprayed his thoughts at random, creating mental disturbances in his vicinity. Like a thunderstorm creating radio static, there was no selectivity.

Savagely, David Houston did what he had to do. It might be a trap, but he had to avoid the carnage that might follow if this went on. He hurled a beam of thought, hard-held, at the offending mind of the awakening telepath.

DON’T THINK! RELAX!

Normally it was impossible for a Controller to take over the mind of another Controller, but these were abnormal circumstances; the half-conscious man, whoever he was, was weakened mentally by some kind of enforced unconsciousness–either a drug or a stun gun. Houston took over his mind smoothly and easily.

Robert Harris!

Houston recognized the mind as soon as he held it.

He didn’t try to force anything on Harris’s mind; he simply held it, cradling it, helping Harris to regain consciousness easily, bringing him up from the darkness gently.

In normal sleep, everyone’s mind retains a certain amount of self-control and awareness of environment. If it didn’t, noise and bright lights wouldn’t awaken a sleeping person.

* * * * *

In normal sleep, a telepath retained enough control to keep his thoughts to himself, even when waking up.

But total anaesthesia brought on a mental blackout from which the victim recovered only with effort. And during that time, a Controller’s mind was violently disturbing to the Normal minds around him, who mistook his disordered thoughts for their own.

Like pouring heavy oil on choppy waters, Houston soothed the disturbances of Harris’s mind, focusing the random broadcasts on his own brain.

And while he did that, he probed gently into the weakened mind of the prisoner for information.

Harris was a Controller, all right; there was no doubt about that. But nowhere in his mind was there any trace of any knowledge of what had happened to Sir Lewis Huntley. If Sir Lewis had actually been controlled, it hadn’t been done by Robert Harris.

Houston wished he’d been able to probe Sir Lewis’s mind; he’d have been able to get a lot more information out of it than he had in his possession now. But that would have been dangerous; if Sir Lewis was a Controller himself, and had been acting a part, Houston would have given himself away the instant he attempted to touch the baronet’s mind. If, on the other hand, Sir Lewis had actually been under the control of another telepath, any probing into the mind of the puppet would have betrayed Houston to the real Controller.

Harris knew nothing. He wasn’t acquainted with any other Controllers, and had kept his nose clean ever since he’d discovered his latent powers. He knew that megalomaniac Controllers were either captured or mobbed, and he had no wish to experience either.

The Normals had long since discovered that the only way to overcome a Controller was by force of numbers. A Controller could only hold one Normal mind at a time. That was why a mob could easily kill a single Controller; that was why the Psychodeviant Police had evolved the “net” system for arresting a telepath.

Harris, then, had been framed. Or could it be called a frame-up when Harris was really guilty of the actual crime? Because the crime he had really been accused of was not that of controlling Sir Lewis, but the crime of being a telepath. That, and that alone, damned him in the eyes of the Normals; the crime of taking over a mind for gain was incidental. The stigma lies in what he was, not what he did.

Harris himself was in the bottom of the plane, in the baggage section near the landing gear. After his trial, still drugged, he had been secretly put aboard, to be taken to the Long Island Spaceport in New York. It had had to be secret; no Normal would knowingly ride on an aircraft which carried a Controller, even if he were drugged into total unconsciousness.