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Thorby asked. "Not the Syndon liner."
    "Free Trader Romany Lass, bound for the Rim . . . and your friend was in her. You go home now and get your breakfast. No, go buy your breakfast, for a treat."
     
    Baslim no longer tried to hide his extraprofessional activities from Thorby, although he never explained the why or how. Some days only one of them would beg, in which case the Plaza of Liberty was always the pitch, for it appeared that Baslim was especially interested in arrivals and departures of ships and most especially movements of slave ships and the auction that always followed the arrival of one.
    Thorby was more use to him after his education had progressed. The old man seemed to think that everyone had a perfect memory and he was stubborn enough to impress his belief despite the boy's grumbles.
    "Aw, Pop, how do you expect me to remember? You didn't give me a chance to look at it!"
    "I projected that page at least three seconds. Why didn't you read it?"
    "Huh? There wasn't time."
    "I read it. You can, too. Thorby, you've seen jugglers in the Plaza. You've seen old Mikki stand on his head and keep nine daggers in the air while he spins four hoops with his feet?"
    "Uh, sure."
    "Can you do that?"
    "No."
    "Could you learn to?"
    "Uh . . . I don't know."
    " Anyone can learn to juggle . . . with enough practice and enough beatings." The old man picked up a spoon, a stylus, and a knife and kept them in the air in a simple fountain. Presently he missed and stopped. "I used to do a little, just for fun. This is juggling with the mind . . . and anyone can learn it , too."
    "Show me how you did that, Pop."
    "Another time, if you behave yourself. Right now you are learning to use your eyes. Thorby, this mind-juggling was developed a long time ago by a wise man, a Doctor Renshaw, on the planet Earth. You've heard of Earth."
    "Well . . . sure, I've heard of it."
    "Mmm . . . meaning you don't believe in it?"
    "Uh, I don't know . . . but all that stuff about frozen water falling from the sky, and cannibals ten feet tall, and towers higher than the Praesidium, and little men no bigger than dolls that live in trees—well, I'm not a fool, Pop."
    Baslim sighed and wondered how many thousands of times he had sighed since saddling himself with a son. "Stories get mixed up. Someday—when you've learned to read—I'll let you view books you can trust."
    "But I can read now."
    "You just think you can. Thorby, there is such a place as Earth and it truly is strange and wonderful—a most unlikely planet. Many wise men have lived and died there—along with the usual proportion of fools and villains—and some of their wisdom has come down to us. Samuel Renshaw was one such wise man. He proved that most people go all their lives only half awake; more than that, he showed how a man could wake up and live—see with his eyes, hear with his ears, taste with his tongue, think with his mind, and remember perfectly what he saw, heard, tasted, thought." The old man shoved his stump out. "This doesn't make me a cripple. I see more with my one eye than you do with two. I am growing deaf . . . but not as deaf as you are, because what I hear, I remember. Which one of us is the cripple? But, son, you aren't going to stay crippled, for I am going to renshaw you if I have to beat your silly head in!"
    As Thorby learned to use his mind, he found that he liked to; he developed an insatiable appetite for the printed page, until, night after night, Baslim would order him to turn off the viewer and go to bed. Thorby didn't see any use in much of what the old man forced him to learn—languages, for example, that Thorby had never heard. But they were not hard, with his new skill in using his mind, and when he discovered that the old man had spools and reels which could be read or listened to only in these "useless" tongues, he suddenly found them worth knowing. History and galactography he loved; his personal world, light-years wide in physical space, had been in