Remember the party where we met? sent Bremen.

Mmmm. Gail’s attention was thin. Already the black fingers of panic were creeping around the edge of her awareness as the pain began to overwhelm the painkiller. The thin needle behind her eye seemed to grow hotter.

Bremen tried to send memory images of Chuck Gilpen’s party a decade earlier, of their first meeting, of that first second when their minds had opened to one another and they had realized I am not alone. And then the corollary realization, I am not a freak. There, in Chuck Gilpen’s crowded town house, amid the tense babble and even tenser neurobabble of mingling teachers and graduate students, their lives had been changed forever.

Bremen was just inside the door—someone had pressed a drink in his hand—when suddenly he had sensed another mindshield quite near him. He had put out a gentle probe, and immediately Gail’s thoughts had swept across him like a searchlight in a dark room.

Both were stunned. Their first reaction had been to increase the strength of their mindshields, to roll up like frightened armadillos. Each soon found that useless against the unconscious and almost involuntary probes of the other. Neither had ever encountered another telepath of more than primitive, untapped ability. Each had assumed that he or she was a freak—unique and unassailable. Now they stood naked before each other in an empty place. A second later, almost without volition, they flooded each other’s mind with a torrent of images, self-images, half memories, secrets, sensations, preferences, perceptions, hidden shames, half-formed longings, and fully formed fears. Nothing was held back. Every petty cruelty committed, sexual experiment experienced, and prejudice harbored poured out along with thoughts of past birthday parties, former lovers, parents, and an endless stream of trivia. Rarely had two people known each other as well after fifty years of marriage.