the ceiling.

In repose, his face looked even younger than his twenty-eight years
would have led one to expect. His close-cropped brown hair added to
the impression of youth, and the well-tailored suit on his slim,
muscular body added to the effect. At any top-flight university, he
could have passes for a well-bred, sophisticated, intelligent student
who had money enough to indulge himself and sense enough not to overdo
it.

He was beginning to understand the pattern that was being woven in the
room above--beginning to feel it in depth.

Senator Gonzalez was mildly telepathic, inasmuch as he could pick up
thoughts in the prevocal stage--the stage at which thought becomes
definitely organized into words, phrases, and sentences. He could go a
little deeper, into the selectivity stage, where the linking processes
of logic took over from the nonlogical but rational processes of the
preconscious--but only if he knew the person well. Where the senator
excelled was in detecting emotional tone and manipulating emotional
processes, both within himself and within others.

Brian Taggert was an analyzer, an originator, a motivator--and more.
The young man found himself avoiding too deep a probe into the mind of
Brian Taggert; he knew that he had not yet achieved the maturity to
understand the multilayered depths of a mind like that. Eventually,
perhaps....

Not that Senator Gonzales was a child, nor that he was emotionally or
intellectually shallow. It was merely that he was not of Taggert's
caliber.

The young man absently took another drag from his cigarette. Taggert
had explained the basic problem to him, but he was getting a wider
picture from the additional information that Senator Gonzales had
brought.

Dr. Theodore Nordred, a mathematical physicist and one of the
top-flight, high-powered, original minds in the field, had shown that
Einstein's final equations only held in a universe composed entirely
of normal matter. Since the great Einstein had died before the
Principle of Parity had been overthrown in the mid-fifties, he had
been unable to incorporate the information into his Unified Field
Theory. Nordred had been able to show, mathematically, that Einstein's
equations were valid only for a completely "dexter," or right-handed
universe, or for a completely "sinister" or left-handed universe.

Although the universe in which Man lived was predominantly
dexter--arbitrarily so designated--it was not completely so.