So he is left to his own resources. No matter. He has ways of entertaining himself. He wanders the farm for a while, peering at the hen-coop and the combine, and then settles down in a quiet corner of the fields. Time for mind-movies. Lazily he casts his net. The power rises and goes forth, looking for emanations. What shall I read, what shall I read? Ah. A sense of contact. His questing mind has snared another mind, a buzzing one, small, dim, intense. It is a bee’s mind, in fact: David is not limited only to contact with humans. Of course there are no verbal outputs from the bee, nor any conceptual ones. If the bee thinks at all, David is incapable of detecting those thoughts. But he does get into the bee’s head. He experiences a strong sense of what it is like to be tiny and compact and winged and fuzzy. How dry the universe of a bee is: bloodless, desiccated, arid. He soars. He swoops. He evades a passing bird, as monstrous as a winged elephant. He burrows deep into a steamy, pollen-laden blossom. He goes aloft again. He sees the world through the bee’s faceted eyes. Everything breaks into a thousand fragments, as though seen through a cracked glass; the essential color of everything is gray, but odd hues lurk at the corners of things, peripheral blues and scarlets that do not correspond in any way to the colors he knows. The effect, he might have said twenty years later, is an extremely trippy one. But the mind of a bee is a limited one. David bores easily. He abandons the insect abruptly and, zooming his perceptions barnward, clicks into the soul of a hen. She is laying an egg! Rhythmic internal contractions, pleasurable and painful, like the voiding of a mighty turd. Frenzied squawks. The smarmy hen-coop odor, sharp and biting. A sense of too much straw all about. The world looks dark and dull to this bird. Heave. Heave. Oooh! Orgasmic excitement! The egg slides through the hatch and lands safely. The hen subsides, fulfilled, exhausted. David departs from her in this moment of rapture. He plunges deep into the adjoining woods, finds a human mind, enters it. How much richer and more intense it is to make communion with his own species. His identity blurs into that of his communicant, who is Barbara Stein, who is getting laid by Hans Schiele. She is naked and lying on a carpet of last year’s fallen leaves. Her legs are spread and her eyes are closed. Her skin is damp with sweat. Hans’ fingers dig into the soft flesh of her shoulders and his cheek, rough with blond stubble, abrades her cheek. His weight presses down on her chest, flattening her breasts and emptying her lungs. With steady thrusts and unvarying tempo he penetrates her, and as his long stiff member slowly and patiently rams into her again and again, throbbing sensation spreads in eddying ripples outward from her loins, growing less intense with distance. Through her mind David observes the impact of the hard penis against the tender, slippery internal membranes. He picks up her clamorous heartbeat. He notices her hammering her heels against the calves of Hans’ legs. He is aware of the slickness of her own fluids on her buttocks and thighs. And now he senses the first dizzying spasms of orgasm. David struggles to remain with her, but he knows he won’t succeed; clinging to the consciousness of someone who’s coming is like trying to ride a wild horse. Her pelvis bucks and heaves, her fingernails desperately rake her lover’s back, her head twists to one side, she gulps for air, and, as she erupts with pleasure, she catapults David from her unsaddled mind. He travels only a short way, into the stolid soul of Hans Schiele, who unknowingly grants the virgin voyeur a few instants of knowledge of what it is like to be stoking the furnace of Barbara Stein, thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust, her inner muscles clamping fiercely against the swollen prod, and then, almost immediately, comes the tickle of Hans’ onrushing climax. Hungry for information, David holds on with all his strength, hoping to keep contact right through the tumult of fulfillment, but no, he is flipped free, he tumbles uncontrollably, the world goes swinging past him in giddy streaks of color, until — click! — he finds a new sanctuary. All is calm here. He glides through a dark cold environment. He has no weight; his body is long and slender and agile; his mind is nearly a void, but through it run faint chilly flickering perceptions of a low order. He has entered the consciousness of a fish, perhaps a brook trout. Downstream he moves in the swiftly rushing creek, taking delight in the smoothness of his motions and the delicious texture of the pure icy water flowing past his fins. He can see very little and smell even less; information comes to him in the form of minute impacts on his scales, tiny deflections and interferences. Easily he responds to each incoming news item, now twisting to avoid a fang of rock, now fluttering his fins to seize some speedy subcurrent. The process is fascinating, but the trout itself is a dull companion, and David, having extracted the troutness of the experience in two or three minutes, leaps gladly to a more complex mind the moment he approaches one. It is the mind of gnarled old Georg Schiele, Hans’ father, who is at work in a remote corner of the cornfield. David has never entered the elder Schiele’s mind before. The old man is a grim and forbidding character, well past sixty, who says little and stalks dourly through his day-long round of chores with his heavy-jowled face perpetually locked in a frosty scowl. David occasionally wonders whether he once might have been a concentration-camp attendant, though he knows the Schieles came to America in 1935. The farmer gives off so unpleasant a psychic aura that David has steered clear of him, but so bored is he with the trout that he slips into Schiele now, slides down through dense layers of unintelligible Deutsch ruminations, and strikes bottom in the basement of the farmer’s soul, the place where his essence lives. Astonishment: old Schiele is a mystic, an ecstatic! No dourness here. No dark Lutheran vindictiveness. This is pure Buddhism: Schiele stands in the rich soil of his fields, leaning on his hoe, feet firmly planted, communing with the universe. God floods his soul. He touches the unity of all things. Sky, trees, earth, sun, plants, brook, insects, birds — everything is one, part of a seamless whole, and Schiele resonates in perfect harmony with it. How can this be? How can such a bleak, inaccessible man entertain such raptures in his depths? Feel his joy! Sensations drench him! Birdsong, sunlight, the scent of flowers and clods of upturned earth, the rustling of the sharp-bladed green cornstalks, the trickle of sweat down the reddened deep-channeled neck, the curve of the planet, the fleecy premature outline of the full moon — a thousand delights enfold this man. David shares his pleasure. He kneels in his mind, reverent, awed. The world is a mighty hymn. Schiele breaks from his stasis, raises his hoe, brings it down; heavy muscles go taut and metal digs into earth, and everything is as it should be, all conforms to the divine plan. Is this how Schiele goes through his days? Is such happiness possible? David is surprised to find tears bulging in his eyes. This simple man, this narrow man, lives in daily grace. Suddenly sullen, bitterly envious, David rips his mind free, whirls, projects it toward the woods, drops down into Barbara Stein again. She lies back, sweat-sticky, exhausted. Through her nostrils David receives the stink of semen already going sour. She rubs her hands over her skin, plucking stray bits of leaf and grass from herself. Idly she touches her softening nipples. Her mind is slow, dull, almost as empty as the trout’s, just now: sex seems to have drained her of personality. David shifts to Hans and finds him no better. Lying by Barbara’s side, still breathing hard after his exertions, he is torpid and depressed. His wad is shot and all desire is gone from him; peering sleepily at the girl he has just possessed, he is conscious mainly of body odors and the untidiness of her hair. Through the upper levels of his mind wanders a wistful thought, in English punctuated by clumsy German, of a girl from an adjoining farm who will do something to him with her mouth that Barbara refuses to do. Hans will be seeing her on Saturday night. Poor Barbara, David thinks, and wonders what she would say if she knew what Hans is thinking. Idly he tries to bridge their two minds, entering both in the mischievous hope that thoughts may flow from one to the other, but he miscalculates his span and finds himself returning to old Schiele, deep in his ecstasy, while holding contact with Hans as well. Father and son, old and young, priest and profaner. David sustains the twin contact a moment. He shivers. He is filled with a thundering sense of the wholeness of life.