Charles scrambled down just ahead of a spear. He let himself be led back to the smithy block house and shoved through the crawl hole. "I was thinking about what you said the other day," Kennedy beamed, rasping a file over an arrowhead. "When I said that to change one molecule in the past you'd have to change _every_ molecule in the past, and you said, 'Maybe so.' I've figured that what you were driving at was--" "Kennedy," Charles said, "please shut up just this once. I've got to think." "In what sense do you mean that, Charles? Do you mean that you're a rational animal and therefore that your _being_ rather than _essense_ is--" "_Shut up or I'll pick up a rock and bust your head in with it!_" Charles roared. He more than half meant it. Kennedy hunched down before his hearth looking offended and scared. Charles squatted with his head in his hands. _I have been listening to you._ Repeated drives of the Government to wipe out the aborigines. Drives that never succeeded. _I'll never see anything again._ The way the witch girl had blasted her rival--but that was suggestion. But-- _I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_ He'd said nothing like that to anybody, not to her or poor Kennedy. He thought vaguely of _psi_ force, a fragment in his memory. An old superstition, like the id-ego-superego triad of the sick-minded psychologists. Like vectors of the mind, exploded nonsense. But-- _I have been listening to you. Why are you untrue to your brothers?_ Charles smacked one fist against the sand floor in impotent rage. He was going as crazy as Kennedy. Did the witch girl--and Martha--have hereditary _psi_ power? He mocked himself savagely: that's such a _general_ question! Neurotic adolescent girls in kerosene-lit farmhouses, he thought vaguely. Things that go bump--and crash and blooie and _whoo-oo-oo!_ in the night. Not in electric lit city apartments. Not around fleshed-up middle-aged men and women. You take a hyperthyroid virgin, isolate her from power machinery and electric fields, put on the pressures that make her feel alone and tense to the bursting point--and naturally enough, something bursts. A chamberpot sails from under the bed and shatters on the skull of stepfather-tyrant. The wide-gilt-framed portrait of thundergod-grandfather falls with a crash. Sure, the nail crystallized and broke--_who crystallized it?_ Neurotic adolescent girls speaking in tongues, reading face-down cards and closed books, screaming aloud when sister or mother dies in a railroad wreck fifty miles away, of cancer a hundred miles away, in a bombing overseas. Sometimes they made saints of them. Sometimes they burned them. Burned them and _then_ made saints of them. A blood-raw hunk of venison came sailing through one of the loopholes and flopped on the sand. _I was sorry when the other outsider took your dinner._