t in wasting time on the one
danger he understood perfectly.

"This vision," Alcorn said, "and the sensory sharpness and conviction of
disaster that come with it--it's no ordinary hallucination. It's as real
as my peculiar talent and represents a very real danger. It's working
some sort of change in me that I don't like and I've got to find out
what that change is or I'm done for. I _feel_ that."

Obligingly, the psychiatrist said, "Describe your experience."

Talking about it made perspiration stand out on Alcorn's forehead.
"First I'm seized with a sudden sense of abnormally sharpened
perception, as if I were on the point of becoming aware of a great many
things beyond my immediate awareness. I can feel the emotions of people
about me and I have the conviction that, in another moment, I shall be
able to feel their thoughts as well.

"Then I seem to be standing alone on a frozen arctic plain, a polar
wasteland that should be utterly deserted, but isn't. I've no actual
sensations of touch or hearing, yet the scene is visually sharp in every
detail.

"There's a small village of corrugated sheet-metal houses just ahead,
the sort that engineers on location might raise, and the streets between
are packed with snow. Machines loaded with metal boxes crawl up and down
those streets, but I've never seen their drivers. Until this morning, I
never saw any people at all on the plain."

Dr. Hagen rattled his paper and nodded agreeably. "Go on. What are these
people like?"

"I can't tell you that," Alcorn said, "because their images were not
complete. There seems to be a sort of relationship between them and
myself--a threatening one--but I can't guess what it may be. I can't
even tell you what racial type they belong to, because they have no
faces."

He crushed out his cigarette and took a deep breath, getting to the
worst of it. "I have a distinct conviction during each of these seizures
that the people I see are not ordinary human beings, that they're as
different from me as I am from everyone else, though not in the same
way. It's the difference that makes me uneasy. I can feel the urgency
and the resolution in them, as if they were determined to do--or had
resigned themselves to doing--something desperately important. And then
I know somehow that each of them has made some kind of decision
recently, a decision that is responsible for his being what he is and
where he is, and that I'll have to make a similar one when t