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whoever’s out there.”
    “He might pick it up himself—he’s a bit of a sponge,” Tauber said, talking about me(!). He gave Mr. Dulles a moment to protest, then returned my way. “Memory’s real sensual. Once you’ve got that real good mental connection with somebody, you share whatever they’re thinkin’. Not just thinkin’ really—sights, sounds, smells—you can pull all kinds o’ stuff outta their heads. Or you can make ‘em see things that aren’t there, say things you want ‘em to say, things you want ‘em to believe . It gets pretty comical sometimes.”
    “That’s enough,” Mr. Dulles said but Tauber’s eyes were bright.
    “The thing is, once you make that connection, it’s not like you’re in ‘em, it’s like you’re them . You not only know what happened, you know how it felt .” He was rising up in the back seat now, the power of the thing carrying him, like an addict remembering his first fix, when he felt like he was touching God—hell, when he felt like he was God.
    “And then ya feed it back to ‘em—into their minds—with all those feelings attached and it breezes by every gut check, every guidepost the mind puts up to vet information. It feels like they’re rememberin’ . O’course, you add in some suggestions o’ yer own to tip the balance a bit.”
    He smiled again, amazed at this nasty, awful achievement. He turned to Max. “But I’ve never known anyone who could do it so damn fast !”
    We headed out onto the highway. The afternoon was waning—every once in a while, a little breeze actually cut through that hotbox car. I was trying to decide if I was any better off for having  the explanation.
     “How did Dave die?” Tauber asked.
    “I told you—shot by three mindbenders, country unknown.”
    “When did you get there?”
    “Right after,” I said, which only deepened the lines on Tauber’s forehead.
    Mr. Dulles reddened. “Dave said he’d been getting probed for a month. He told me something was up but I didn’t believe him.”
    “Why not?”
     “Because I wasn’t getting probed.”
    “What’s probed?” I asked. If they were mindreaders, why didn’t they know I had no clue what they were talking about?
    “Your mind transmits. Your thoughts have a physical dimension.”
    “Like molecules?”
    “Particles and waves, vibrations, frequencies that can be tuned and amplified. The transmission can also, to some extent, be tracked. I know your base frequency now. If you were arrested, I could follow you from several miles away to the police station.”
    “So when an agent’s nearby and ya don’t know his frequency,” Tauber said, “ya probe for it. Ya send out a signal that hits a bunch o’ frequencies and see if it gets a response.”
    “And what do you do about it?”
    “There are ways to combat it,” Dulles said. “You change your frequency or muffle your signal. You move around the time sequence. Or, sometimes, you catch the probe and follow it back to the originator, to locate whoever’s searching for you.”
    Tauber stared at Max. “You’re saying ya still get probed?”
    “A couple times a year,” Max admitted and it was clear they both felt this was significant. “There are people who…want me to work for them. Doing jobs I have no desire to do. When they get annoying, I disappear. Dave was my safe haven. But when he asked me for help, I told him there was nothing to it, because if I wasn’t getting probed, nobody was getting probed.”
    He slumped a bit in his seat. “I’ll take you to this Miriam Fine,” he continued, “and you can figure out what to do from there.”
     
    ~~~~
     
    We drove quiet for a long time. We’d had an outburst of talking and now we were done spent—yeah, we were spent . I liked the sound of that—it’s a better word. Words were beginning to come back to me, at least that one did. After the year I’d had, a trickle felt like a downpour.
    A moment later the trickle started, like I had