He directed his attention, his and that of the arena troll enclosed behind him, to Ahmed’s taut mind. His stomach was a clenched fist. His mind would hurt, as it had hurt in the arena when Kazi had held a troll’s mind with his own and buffeted the cowering crowd with his rage. More. It would hurt as it had when the giant Northman, naked on the bloody sand, had torn the troll’s mind away from the Master and slammed the throng into unconsciousness.

The sky chariot was almost down, and it would hurt badly.

“NOW!” Ahmed thought to him, and the panels dropped, and a burst of sheer rage and violence exploded from Ahmed into the troll’s mirror mind. Instantly it burst back, greatly magnified, and Ahmed wasn’t even able to clutch his stallion’s mane before dropping like a sack from the saddle. Horses bolted at the thunderclap of psychic rage, or staggered and fell, and some of the unconscious party were dragged bouncing across the prairie. The Alpha landed with a bump, Matthew and Mikhail senseless on her deck.

The only man left conscious was the orc who’d dismounted earlier. He was that rarity, a man totally psi-deaf, selected by Ahmed for this job. The hard-bitten veteran swaggered to the pinnace, deactivated the lock, and within a minute had dragged two shackled bodies out into the tall grass. Then he squatted in the shadow of the Alpha to wait. It wouldn’t be long. He could see the horsemen galloping toward him some distance away. They had been far enough off that the star men would not relate them to the landing, far enough that the thunderbolt from Ahmed’s mind, magnified by the troll’s, was a distant signal, not a felling blow.

There’d be a reward in this for him; perhaps he’d ask for a pretty slave girl from the palace household.

The squawk box was urgent. “Captain Uithoudt to the bridge please! Emergency! Captain Uithoudt to the bridge please! Emergency!”

Ram Uithoudt jabbed the acknowledge button, spit toothpaste into the washbowl, took a moment to rinse it down the drain, then pulled on his jumpsuit, zipping it as he strode down the passageway.

“The radio, sir,” the bridge watch told him.

“Ram here,” he said as he hit the command chair.

“Commander Uithoudt?”

The unfamiliar voice was quiet but hard, its words accented.

“That’s right. Who are you?”

“I am Ahmed, consul of the Empire of Kazi. I have your, ah, pinnace in my control-the one called Alpha. I also hold prisoner the two men who flew it, Matthew Kumalo and Mikhail Ciano. I plan no harm to them, as long as you do not try to interfere with me. My fight is not with you. But if you try to interfere, their death will be your responsibility, and it will be a slow and most unpleasant death. I have experts at that.

“You will also leave your radio on at all times; I will want to contact you again.”

Abruptly the signal ended. The two men on the bridge stared at one another.

Each human instinctively and unconsciously develops the equivalent of computer programs in his mind-a set of more or less integrated and often incompatible programs that together crudely simulate the world. Your programs collectively constitute the world as you know it, and the state of those programs at any given time makes up the only world you know. They are the means through which your brain, your organic computer, operates. You make decisions and take actions on the basis of the printouts of that computer, printouts from programs which are part of your model of the world.

Hendricks has discussed the deficiencies of the system at length. Only one of them seems directly relevant to our discussion here-the egocentricity of those programs. The focal point, the emotional center, of the programs constituting your world, is occupied by your enthroned ego. It colors not only all you think and do, but all you “know” as well. It makes your subjective world what Kuznetsov dubbed the ego world.

It has been suggested that this centrality of the ego is essential as an integrating reference point and for survival of the organism; that without it, man would lack, among other things, a survival instinct. The ego may indeed have begun as a reference point for the integration of data, and its growth may have been a by-product of the survival instinct, but it seems unessential to either. Descriptions and analyses of the barbarian telepath, Nils Jarnhann, all point to his lack of an ego, as the concept of ego is defined today. Yet even allowing for some small degree of exaggeration in the reports of the expedition, Nils did an exceptional job of integrating information and surviving remarkably hazardous situations.

To be convincing, any refinement of ego theory must now consider Nils Jarnhann. Which is to say, it must consider the probability of a strong and effective survival mechanism and an integrating center of reference independent of any powerful, albeit unconscious, emotional image of the self as the center of the world.

At the same time, of course, we must reject the “explanations” of the New Movement gnostics. These are essentially pre-technological theology in pseudo-scientific trappings, with the unlikely premise that the human ego is the “spirit” or “soul” in a somehow degraded condition. Nils Jarnhann, then, is “explained” as a case in which the degraded condition was somehow miraculously dispelled or perhaps avoided!…

… Operating with a set of seemingly objective programs, a non-egocentric world model, Nils showed unique ability to learn. Mrs. Kumalo found existing intelligence tests inadequate for precise determination, but established that he did in fact possess “substantially superior mental equipment.”

An alternative, or more likely complementary, explanation might be that his objectivity itself enabled him to discern, learn, and reason more effectively than the great majority of men.

Of course, his direct access to the thoughts of others must have helped, but most other telepaths seem not to approach him in ability to learn or to make correct decisions.

All in all there was that about him which makes one uncomfortable when trying to explain him scientifically. And that is entirely aside from the interesting apocrypha that have grown up about him. It seems as if he was playing a joke on us by being what he was.

Mrs. Kumalo questioned him in a specific effort to understand his gestalt (sensu Watanabe). She stated categorically that she never succeeded, but felt she could characterize certain aspects of it. She wrote that, among other things, he did not have or use a conscious mind in the usual sense of the term. Yet he was obviously very conscious indeed. He was more sensitive to what happened around him, more aware, than anyone else she had ever known, an impression of him shared by the expedition generally. Nor was he a cold hard logic machine-a biophysical computer so to speak. He has been described as cheerful, considerate of others, charismatic, and possessing a sense of humor, which, to me at least, is reassuring.

Even more than with most men, the productive work of his mind apparently took place at a subconscious level. And he does not seem to have reviewed its “printouts” consciously. Whatever monitoring of them he may have done seems, like the computing itself, to have been subliminal. His printouts were available, however, for what we might call conscious expression. That is, he could explain his reasons better and more simply than most of us explain ours, and I suspect that if he were writing this, it would be much simpler and considerably more enlightening.