SORDMAN THE PROTECTOR BY TOM PURDOM Illustrated by WOOD [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine August 1960. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He was the most powerful man in the world. He could make anybody do anything--and yet he was the slave of a mad criminal's mind! In a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner. "I'll go up there by myself," Sordman said. He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent. Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him one of the four truly _developed_ psionic adepts in the world. With drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers. Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general thought patterns of the people near him. "We'd better go with you," Lee Shawn said. "There's an awful lot of fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent." She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent. "Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone." Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth. "Go ahead and laugh," George Aaron said. "But you'll need big medicine to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important." "I've thought it over," Sordman said. "I'll depend on God and nothing else." He felt George's mind squirm. As a psychologist, George accepted Sordman's Zen-Christian faith because Sordman needed it to control the powers of his Talent. But George himself was a confirmed skeptic. The men up there were scared. Sordman knew he would die if he lost control. But Lee and George were scared, too. Even now, standing in the park in early morning, their fear battered at his mind. He thought about swimming in the ocean. He made his skin remember salted wind. The real Atlantic, a mile away, helped the illusion. It was the right symbol. He felt his friends calm. "Let him go," George said. "He's manipulating us," Lee said. "I know. But let him go." Sordman laughed. Lee bent and tore a clump of grass from the earth. "Take this, Andy." "Thank you." It was wet with dew. He held it to his nose and smelled the dirt and grass. Two things kept him from destruction by his own Talent. He loved the physical world and he believed in God. "I'll call you if I need you," he said. "Be careful," George said. "Many people need you."