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Moon to take advantage of my credentials as a psychotherapist.”
    That got a small smile from her.
    “No. I came to see you because I want to be involved. Involved in the solution.”
    “And you think I’m the solution? That’s very flattering, Doctor. But you didn’t think so when I initially invited you to advise me. What’s changed?”
    “I’ve followed the hearings closely, as you might expect.”
    “Get you another scotch?”
    She hesitated a moment, staring blankly at her empty tumbler.
    “Yes.”
    “I’m sorry, you were saying?”
    “I think you have conducted the hearings in as sane a manner as possible, but they’ve made things worse.”
    He frowned.
    “Surely you see that they’re necessary, Dr. Kimbrell ? It’s unfortunate, but telepathy is too powerful a tool-and a weapon-not to be regulated. What do you think the killings are all about? People are afraid, afraid that the person next to them might be reading their minds.”
    “They’re jealous.”
    “That, too. Human society is structured around secrets, around limited disclosure. Success has always meant being able to navigate in that world, guess the unspoken, erect a facade. And now we find that there are people who have the inborn ability to simply cut through all that. Would you like to play poker with a telepath? Or trade stocks against someone who could secure inside information simply by being in the room with the right person? It’s not so much a matter of specifically regulating telepaths as it is of making certain that existing laws regarding privacy and disclosure aren’t violated by them.”
    “And yet you are specifically regulating telepaths-telepaths can’t be lawyers, or stockbrokers, or Olympic fencers-“
    “Plenty of precedent for that. Specific exclusions were spelled out for the use of the radar tap, too, when it was invented.”
    “These are people, not listening devices.”
    “They are both, I’m afraid, which makes regulation all the more necessary. People won’t stop killing telepaths-and people they suspect of being telepaths-until they stop feeling threatened by them. That won’t happen without regulation.”
    She nodded.
    “I know. But you agree, as matters stand, that the hearings are only making things worse-you daily present potential abuses that most people haven’t even thought of. The fact that you regulate these abuses is meaningless-“
    “-because we still have no way of knowing who the telepaths are. Exactly. And so we worry people more and more without giving them any tangible hope. But what else is there to do?”
    She was silent for a moment, taking a significant drink of her new scotch. He leaned forward and said, very softly,
    “You know what we can do, don’t you?”
    She stared hard at the table.
    “I’m going to lose my job,” she said very simply. “I’ll never work in academia again if I do this. I need some guarantees.”
    “You’ll have them. You want a job, you’ve got it. Money.”
    She suddenly seemed very young, very vulnerable.
    “I have money, Senator-how do you think I got to the Moon? That’s not my concern. I want to know that this will be handled right. I don’t want to place another loaded gun in the wrong hands. I…”
    “You came to me because you thought I would do the right thing.”
    She nodded.
    “A paper just came across my desk. It involves gene sequencing-“
    “The telepathy gene?”
    “It’s not so simple as that. No one has found any gene that seems to control for telepathy. It appears to be like intelligence, an emergent property found in many different genes. But the author of this paper did find a marker.”
    “Really? What do you mean?”
    “Most of us are now postulating that telepathic ability is either a recent mutation or the result of an isolated one that has only recently entered the global gene pool. For instance, one of the Highland New Guinea groups may have had telepaths for a thousand years, but since they were isolated