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sessions, Heather, Mark and Jen gradually learned to establish mental barriers that effectively shielded parts of their minds from each other. Connected through the headbands, their minds each had the capacity to open to the others. Fortunately, that openness could be selectively disabled, effectively firewalling off layers of thoughts and feelings. The bad news was that if a person got interested, aggressively pursuing another’s thoughts, it became very difficult to disentangle him or her from the deeper parts of one’s mind.
    After every headset session, Jack and Janet directed an intense debriefing. Upon discovering the difficulty Heather had encountered in mentally ejecting an uncooperative headset wearer, namely Mark, from her mind, Jack locked in on the problem. He devised a series of trials that became mental wrestling matches. One by one they would each probe each other’s mental defenses, under strict instructions that once they had penetrated another’s barriers, they were to disengage and debrief.
    Over the weeks, as Mark, Jen, and Heather grew stronger, it became harder and harder to bypass their opponents’ mental blocks. But when a block failed, those brief glimpses into each other’s souls were both traumatic and thrilling.
    Now, settled into the alien couch on the Bandolier Ship’s command deck, Heather recognized Jack’s deeper purpose. All their mental wrestling practice had been designed to ready them for this moment. Only this time their opponent wouldn’t be a living, breathing person.
    Mark? Jen?
    Right here. Mark’s mind softly touched hers.
    Me too , Jen intoned. Following your lead.
    Heather centered, focusing her thoughts on the Bandolier Ship, its crew, and the headbands, pulling forth the visions that lurked just beneath her mind’s calm, dark surface. And as those visions intensified, she felt herself sucked across the boundary into a different alien reality.

Mark felt the alien couch enfold his virtual body as Heather’s visions whispered at the corner of his awareness. Lowering all barriers, he allowed the visions in, succumbing to the raw power of Heather’s mind.
    In rapid succession, she played back every time they had been on the Bandolier Ship, every time they had been connected to the headsets. Mark felt Jennifer join the effort as Heather absorbed his sister’s solo visits to the Bandolier starship.
    Again and again the sequence replayed itself, and each time the emphasis of the vision shifted, replaying the scenes at different speeds and from different perspectives. Suddenly the focus narrowed and intensified.
    Gabriel! The name rang their joint minds like the tolling of a distant bell. One of three biblical archangels, regarded as the angel of mercy by most Christians, as the angel of judgment inthe Jewish tradition. It was said the sounding of Gabriel’s horn would signal the end of days.
    The Rag Man had been the first to find the Bandolier Ship, the first to wear the fourth headset. He had seen the alien visions, his sick mind interpreting his assigned role as that of the new Gabriel, the one destined to sound the horn to end all things.
    And the Rag Man had watched as Mark, Jennifer, and Heather had found the cave and the alien craft. The probabilities clicked into place in Heather’s mind. He had known they had worn the other three headsets. The Rag Man’s access to the starship had been more extensive than their own. The ship had used the Rag Man to evaluate them, seeking to assess their fitness to fulfill the roles represented by the other three headsets, gradually granting them more access as they were deemed worthy.
    The shock of that realization stunned Mark. Their Bandolier Ship had granted the Rag Man full access to its data banks, something it continued to deny them. And in the end, the Rag Man had decided that Heather, like Jack’s partner hanging on the meat hook in the Rag Man’s cave, was only worthy of death. What kind of artificial intelligence