dy listening.

This whole gale of thought was blowing over Garlock's receptors like a
Great Plains wind over miles-wide fields of corn. He did not address
anyone directly; no one addressed him. At first, quite a few young
women, at sight of his unusual physique, had sent out tentative feelers
of thought; and some men had wondered, in the same tentative and
indirect fashion, who he was and where he came from. However, when the
information he had given Atterlin spread throughout the city--and it did
not take long--no one paid any more attention to him than they did to
each other.

Probing into and through various buildings, he learned that groups of
people were quitting work at intervals of about fifteen minutes. There
were thoughts of tidying up desks; of letting the rest of this junk go
until tomorrow; of putting away and/or covering up office machines of
various sorts. There were thoughts of powdering noses and of repairing
make-up.

He pulled in his receptors and scanned the crowded ways for
guardians--he'd have to call them that until either he or Lola found out
their real name. Same as at the airport--the more people, the more
guardians. What were they? How? And why?

* * *

He probed; carefully but thoroughly. When he had talked to the Arpalone
he had read him easily enough, but here there was nothing whatever to
read. The creature simply was not thinking at all. But that didn't make
sense! Garlock tuned, first down, then up; and finally, at the very top
of his range, he found something, but he did not at first know what it
was. It seemed to be a mass-detector ... no, two of them, paired and
balanced. Oh, that was it! One tuned to humanity, one to the other
guardians--balanced across a sort of bridge--_that_ was how they kept
the ratio so constant! But why? There seemed to be some wide-range
receptors there, too, but nothing seemed to be coming in....

While he was still studying and still baffled, some kind of stimulus,
which was so high and so faint and so alien that he could neither
identify nor interpret it, touched the Arpalone's far-flung receptors.
Instantly the creature jumped, his powerful, widely-bowed legs sending
him high above the heads of the crowd and, it seemed to Garlock,
directly toward him. Simultaneously there was an insistent, low-pitched,
whistling scream, somewhat like the noise made by an airplane in a
no-power dive; and Garlock saw, out of the corner of on