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dropped open, then closed.
    “I didn’t know,” he said.
    “I don’t advertise it,” Garibaldi said.
    “But maybe you understand, now, why you’re in my office.”
    “No, actually, I don’t. You have a grudge against Bester. You think he let me live to deliver a lie, to lay a false trail. You seem pretty convinced of it, and you’re even implying I may have cooperated in the whole thing. You seem to have all of the answers, Mr. Garibaldi. So what do you want with me?”
    Garibaldi scooted back on the desk and put his hands on his thighs.
    “Well, I figure it this way. If you’re on the up-and- up, you may have it in for Bester almost as much as I do. He messed with your head and ruined the life you’d picked out for yourself. In that case, I can use you.
    You were the last person known to have contact with him, and you’re a telepath. You might recognize his psychic imprint or whatever. Did I mention I don’t trust telepaths? I don’t. Especially not the ones in the Metasensory Division, which you aren’t, and that puts you a little ahead in my book. On the other hand, if you are one of Bester’s pals, or if he’s put some kinda sleeper program in you that the monitors didn’t catch, I’d rather have you right here where I can watch you.”
    “Are you offering me a job, Mr. Garibaldi?”
    “You catch on pretty fast, Thompson. I like that. Yeah, I want to offer you a job. And I want my own team to look you over-they won’t dissect you or anything, but I want you examined.”
    Thompson shook his head, slowly.
    “You’re a very confusing man, Mr. Garibaldi.”
    “I try to keep it that way,” Garibaldi replied.
     

     
    Bester watched his enemies gather, and smiled coldly to himself. This was where it ended, this ridiculous war. This was where he paid them back.
    “Proud of yourself?” Bester jerked out his PPG and spun toward the voice.
    “Byron! You’re…”
    “Dead?”
    The younger man’s eyes were contradictions. Sad, compassionate, but at the same time sharp and condemning. Bester hated them. He noticed, as always, the ghostly flames licking up around his one-time student.
    “Truth doesn’t die, Bester.”
    But Bester’s pounding heart was calming.
    “You aren’t the truth,” he said.
    “You’re just the memory of a ghost, an imprint in my brain.”
    “Yes. When I died…”
    “Killed yourself.”
    “When I died, you reached out to me, to try to stop me. It was touching, in death, to know how much you cared. And it allowed me to leave you this little gift, this piece of me, like an angel on your shoulder, like the conscience you never had.”
    “You always were self-important, Byron-but imagining yourself an angel? You started the war, set telepath to fighting telepath. You began the slaughter when you killed yourself, and neatly ducked out of responsibility at the same time. Coward.”
    “You could have given us what we wanted. Freedom. Our own Homeworld.”
    “Oh, yes, your little telepath’s paradise, your imaginary Nirvana where you would all live in peace and harmony with your chanting and your candles. A place where the mundane would never bother you, never become suspicious or worried about you. Your fantasy was the ultimate capitulation to the normals, Byron, the ultimate act of cowardice. Earth was our birthplace. It was always meant to be ours, one day. The normals have been trying to kill us from the beginning-from the first pogroms when our kind were discovered, to Edgars’ scheme a few years ago. Do you think they’d like anything better than to have us all in one place? Do you think they could tolerate the idea of a planet full of telepaths?”
    “This is what I think,” Byron said.
    “I think you did such terrible things in your life, in the name of the Corps, that you couldn’t see any other way without losing your mind. Now that I’m part of you, that’s clearer than ever. What was the girl’s name-Montoya? Your first love?”
    “Leave her out of