Cops. I'd never had any trouble with them before. Now it was just Ray Berton and the cops--and nothing in between but the cold Martian night. So I turned and ran the other way. A knot of men came out of the tavern and came at me. I stopped. Another jetcar curved into the street from the other end of the block. _All right._ I turned, backed into the side of the triangle of stone, stood waiting and my fists were hard. I'd never had any parents, not much. My mother died when I was born, and twelve years later, my dad died from over-exposure to above ten point cos-rays. It isn't anything to remember, seeing an old man die like that. So I'd been a space bum, and ended up a drunken brawling killer in a North Canal scum sieve! _All right, so maybe you could have done better. Come on and get it, you guys who think you could have done any better. Come on, come on...._ And then it hit me. _Thought._ A big hot fist of it, punching into my head. A big exploding fire of thought--_but not my own_. "_Step over here into the shadows, Ray Berton._" * * * * * I didn't think of telepathy then, though I thought plenty about it afterwards. I stumbled back, wanting to get away, but scared. I started to sweat; somebody could get inside me, and stay there and do things to me. Things worse than a Martian cop could do with his coercoats and neuron twisters. My head hurt and I yelled something. Everything around me started to melt and run together, and the stone under my boots got soft. I got a fading look at them, two of them, standing like purple shadows. A girl with black black eyes. And a man, a big Earthman, aristocratic and distinguished-looking, with eyes like polished Venusian fog crystals. I heard the fading thunder from the spaceport outside Sanskran, and that was all, for a while. The next thing I knew I was coming into Earth, a place I'd never been, and wasn't supposed to be able to go to because I'd never been 'purified'. I had no Solar visa, I thought, and didn't want to go through the psyche treatment necessary to get one. But a lot of things changed for me that night when they took me off that street. Teleportation, that's what it was--whatever _that_ is. They had machines all right. Their minds and nervous systems, which they had perfected, were machines. Mind-energy, the basic energy. I learned a little about that stuff later, but not very much. Even after they gave me some of their 'power' like giving a kid candy, I didn't know what it was. Like any dumb atomeer can use the power of breaking atoms and not know anything more about physical science than a New York debutante knows about a _krin-krin_ hangover. Like the experts who still can't tell you what electricity is. I came out of the fog feeling pretty good, considering. I knew one thing right off, as any spacer would: I was in space, at C-acceleration, beyond the neutral-gravity point between planets, and in free fall.