The touch did what words had failed to do; he felt the rigid, frozen fright flow out of her as she held him; hard, clasping his spent body in her arms. With a sigh, she drew his head against the softness of her breast and let him lie there. This was the best way. It had come to him without words; perhaps there were no words. But what had he done to Fran, to this shy girl who held him now so tightly? He sensed, through the tension of her terror and its release, that she loved him--did he love her? When he had asked himself that, he could not answer--yet now, in his response to her, he sensed his own answer. Words, more words--what did they mean? Reasoning was a barrier, not a path. He had always felt most apart from her when he had tried to think out their relationship into words. Better to let the words go, better to react. They lay together unmoving on the sofa for a moment which was, for them, timeless--perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps two or three hours. They exchanged no words, no gestures, not even a kiss. They simply _were_, sharing a moment of that meshed, tangible silence in which there was no Max, no Fran; instead a gestalt, a separate emotional entity. "Tell me about it," she said finally. It was like surfacing after a deep dive. He blinked. "I don't know what happened." "How did it begin?" He turned slightly, snuggling closer to her, his cheek buried against her neck, his shoulder tucked under her arm, her arms warm around his body. He paused, then reached out for words and found that the words were there. "If you want to be rational about it--that is, if we _can_ be rational about it--I guess it's what you'd call a wild talent." "_Wild_ is right," she said with a shaky laugh. "Psi power, I guess you'd call it--I can make things move, or--things happen. * * * * * "I had a dream last night. It was a very strange kind of dream--you know how sometimes you have dreams about flying? Like, you're running along on the ground, and sometimes you can jump, and pull your feet into the air, and then you paddle yourself along with your hands--? I dreamed I'd done this and I was floating and weightless, pulling myself around with handholds like an astronaut in a spaceship, only the handholds were the branches of a tree. I was floating, and pulling myself into the tree. "Things began feeling strange. Like they were happening in double--like the dream was fading out into sleepwalking. And then I woke up. "Fran, _I was holding on to the curtains of the window next to my bed, and I was floating about even with the top of the open window!_" He felt her arms tighten around him, but she neither moved nor interrupted him. Blessing her, he went on;