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armchair in front of a small, empty table, and prepared to be bored for ten
straight hours. In accordance with the conditions of the experiment, neither
reading nor writing was permitted. You had to sit and  listen to the silence.
The silence was total. The mesoshield did not let a single thought in from
outside, and here, in this chamber, for the first time in his life Peters
experienced a surprisingly unpleasant feeling of deafness. Probably the
designers of this chamber had not suspected how favorable for the experiment
this silence was. A  deaf esper strained to listen, trying to catch even a
whisper of a signal, whether he wanted to or not. Moreover, the designers had
not known what suffering it cost an esper used to the constant clamor of human
thoughts to spend ten hours in the deaf chamber. Peters called it the torture
chamber, and many espers had picked up the term.
/ have already sat here for one hundred ten hours, thought Peters. At the end
of today it will be a hundred twenty. And nothing. No trace of the notorious
 linkage field which our poor physicists think about so much. And a
hundred-some hours is a good many. Just what are they expecting? A hundred
espers, each of whom has sat in one of these things for about a hundred
hours that s ten thousand hours. Ten thousand hours down the drain. The poor,
poor physicists! And the poor, poor espers! And my poor, poor beavers! Pete
Ballantine is a greenhorn, a kid, out of school for only a few days, I know in
my bones that he s late with the feedings. Probably a week and a half late,
Fll have to send another radiogram this evening. But he s stubborn as a mule,
he doesn t want to hear anything about the special conditions of the Yukon,
And Winter is a greenhorn too, and wishy-washy,
Peters turned nasty. And Eugene is a green, self satisfied fool. You have to
love the beavers! They need love! You have to love them with your whole heart!
So that they themselves will climb up onto the bank for you and poke their
noses into your hand. They have such nice cute faces. And these  fur breeders
have only got problems on their minds. Fur breeding! How to get two pelts from
one beaver! And then make it grow a third! Oh, if only I had my Harry with me
.. , . Harry, my boy, how hard it is without you! If you only knew!
I remember how he came up to me, , . when was it? In January no, February of
one nineteen. He came up and said that he had volunteered for Venus. He said,
 I m sorry, Pa, but that s where they need us now,  After that he came back
twice in one twenty-one and in one twenty-five. The old beavers remembered
him, and he remembered every last one of them. He always told me that he came
back because he had gotten homesick, but I knew that he had come back for
medical treatment. Ah, Harry, Harry, we could get all our good beavers
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together and set up a fine farm now, on Venus. That s possible today. They re
taking many different animals there now .... But you didn  t live to see it,
my boy.
Peters got out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes, stood up, and started pacing
the room. This damned nonsensical cage .. , . Are they going to keep us here
much longer? He thought that by now all hundred espers must be stirring in
their individual cages. Old loud Sieverson, who contrived to be peevish and
kindly at the same time. And that self-satisfied fool McCullough. Where did
people like McCullough come from? Probably you found them only among the
espers. And all because telepathy, whatever you thought of it, was an
abnormality. At least for now. Fortunately, people like McCullough were rare
even among espers. Among professional espers they were nonexistent. Take, for
example, that Yura Rusakov, the long-distance esper. On the long-distance
stations there were many professional espers, but they said that Yura Rusakov
was the strongest of them all, the strongest esper in the world. He could even
pick up direction. That was a very rare talent. He had been an esper since
earliest childhood and from earliest childhood he had known it. And still he
was a jolly, good boy. He had been well brought up he hadn t been treated from
infancy like a genius and prodigy. The most frightful thing for a child was
loving parents. But this one had been brought up in school, and he was a
really nice kid. They said he had cried when he received the last message from
the Explorer. After the accident there had been only one person left alive on
the Explorer, the young midshipman Walter Saronian. A very, very talented
young man, evidently. And one with a will of iron. Wounded, dying, he had
started searching for the cause of the accident and had found it!
Peters came to alertness. Some extraneous, barely noticable, inaudible nuance
had, it seemed, crept into his consciousness. No. It was only the echo off the
walls. He wondered what it would be like if it existed. Georgie-boy had
affirmed that theoretically it should be received as noise. But naturally he
couldn t explain what kind of noise, and when he tried, he either quickly
slipped into mathematics or else put forward uncertain analogies to broken
radio sets. The physicists knew theoretically what kind of noise, but they had
no sensory notion of it, while the espers, not understanding the theory,
perhaps were hearing this noise twenty times a day without suspecting it. What
a pity there s not one single esper physicist! Perhaps that Yura Rusakov will
become the first. He or one of the kids at the long-distance stations. It s a
good thing we instinctively distinguish our thoughts from those of others and
can only accidentally take an echo for an outside signal
Peters sat down and stretched out his legs. Still, the physicists had thought
up a funny business catching spirits from another world. It was natural
science in the spirit world. He looked at his watch. Only thirty minutes had
passed. Well, spirits are spirits. Let s listen.
At precisely seventeen hundred hours, Peters went up to the door. The heavy
slab of titanium steel lifted, and into his consciousness rushed a whirlwind
of excited alien thoughts. As always, he saw the strained, expectant faces of
the physicists, and as always, he shook his head No. He was unbearably sorry
for these young, bright fellows many times he had imagined how wonderful it
would be if right from the threshold he could smile and say,  Linkage fields
do exist I picked up your linkage field for you. But what were you going to
do if the linkage field either did not exist or was beyond the ability of
espers?  Nothing, he said aloud, and stepped into the corridor.
 Too bad, one of the physicists said disappointedly. He always said  too
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