less .. unless ..
you Ihjel stopped it you Ihjel (DEATH) you (DEATH)
you (DEATH) alone couldn't do it you (DEATH)
must have
BRION BRANDD wet-behind-the-ears-raw-untrained-
Brion-Brandd-to-help-you he was the only one in the
galaxy who could finish the job..................................

As the flow of sensation died away, Brion realized he was sprawled
back weakly on his pillows, soaked with sweat, washed with the
memory of the raw emotion. Across from him Ihjel sat with his face
bowed in his hands. When he lifted his head Brion saw within his
eyes a shadow of the blackness he had just experienced.

"Death," Brion said. "That terrible feeling of death. It wasn't just
the people of Dis who would die. It was something more personal."

"Myself," Ihjel said, and behind this simple word were the repeated
echoes of night that Brion had been made aware of with his newly
recognized ability. "My own death, not too far away. This is the
wonderfully terrible price you must pay for your talent. _Angst_ is
an inescapable part of empathy. It is a part of the whole unknown
field of psi phenomena that seems to be independent of time. Death
is so traumatic and final that it reverberates back along the time
line. The closer I get, the more aware of it I am. There is no exact
feeling of date, just a rough location in time. That is the horror
of it. I _know_ I will die soon after I get to Dis--and long before
the work there is finished. I know the job to be done there, and I
know the men who have already failed at it. I also know you are the
only person who can possibly complete the work I have started. Do
you agree now? Will you come with me?"

"Yes, of course," Brion said. "I'll go with you."

IV

"I've never seen anyone quite as angry as that doctor," Brion said.

"Can't blame him." Ihjel shifted his immense weight and grunted from
the console, where he was having a coded conversation with the
ship's brain. He hit the keys quickly, and read the answer from the
screen. "You took away his medical moment of glory. How many times
in his life will he have a chance to nurse back to rugged smiling
health the triumphantly exhausted Winner of the Twenties?"

"Not many, I imagine. The wonder of it is how you managed to
convince him that you and the ship here could take care of me
as well as his hospital could."

"I could never convince him of that," Ihjel said. "But I and the
Cultural Re