"As I remember, there's one of the Highways not far from here--"

She shook her head. "No, Steve. We don't want the Highways in Hiding, either."

At a mere hundred per I could let my esper do the road-sighting, so I looked over at her. She was half-smiling, but beneath the little smile was a firm look of self-confidence. "No," she said quietly, "We don't want the Highways. If we go there, Phelps and his outfit will turn heaven and earth to break it up, now that you've become so important.

You forget that the Medical Center is still being run to look legal and aboveboard; while the Highways are still in Hiding. Phelps could make quite a bitter case out of their reluctance to come out into the open."

"Well, where do we go?" I asked.

"West," she said simply. "West, into New Mexico. To my home."

This sort of startled me. Somehow I'd not connected Farrow with any permanent home; as a nurse and later as one of the Medical Center, I'd come to think of her as having no permanent home of her own. Yet like the rest of us, Nurse Farrow had been brought up in a home with a mother and a father and probably some sisters and brothers. Mine were dead and the original home disbanded, but there was no reason why I should think of everybody else in the same terms. After all, Catherine had had a mother and a father who'd come to see me after her disappearance.

So we went West, across Southern Illinois and over the big bridge at St.

Louis into Missouri and across Missouri and West, West, West. We parked nights in small motels and took turns sleeping with one of us always awake and alert with esper and telepath senses geared high for the first sight of any threat. We gave the Highways we came upon a wide berth; at no time did we come close to any of their way stations. It made our path crooked and much longer than it might have been if we'd strung a line and gone. But eventually we ended up in a small town in New Mexico and at a small ranch house on the edge of the town.

It is nice to have parents; I missed my own deeply when I was reminded of the sweet wonder of having people just plain glad to see their children again, no matter what they'd done under any circ.u.mstances. Even bringing a semi-invalid into their homes for an extended course of treatment.

John Farrow was a tall man with gray at the temples and a pair of sharp blue eyes that missed nothing. He was a fair perceptive who might have been quite proficient if he had taken the full psi course at some university. Mrs. Farrow was the kind of elderly woman that any man would like to have for a mother. She was sweet and gentle but there was neither foolish softness or fatuous nonsense about her. She was a telepath and she knew her way around and let people know that she knew what the score was. Farrow had a brother, James, who was not at home; he lived in town with his wife but came out to the old homestead about once every week on some errand or other.

They took me in as though I'd come home with their daughter for sentimental reasons; Gloria sat with us in their living room and went through the whole story, interrupted now and then by a remark aimed at me. They inspected my hand and agreed that something must be done. They were extremely interested in the Mekstrom problem and were amazed at their daughter's feats of strength and endurance.

My hand, by this time, was beginning to throb again. The infection was heading on a fine start down the pinky and middle fingers; the ring finger was approaching the second joint to that point where the advance stopped long enough for the infection to become complete before it crossed the joint. The first waves of that particular pain were coming at intervals and I knew that within a few hours the pain would become waves of agony so deep that I would not be able to stand it.

Ultimately, Farrow got her brother James to come out from town with his tools, and between us all we rigged up a small manipulator for my hand.

Farrow performed the medical operations from the kit in the back of her car we'd stolen from the Medical Center.

Then after they'd put my hand through the next phase, Nurse Farrow looked me over and gave the opinion that it was now approaching the time for me to get the rest of the full treatment.

One evening I went to bed, to be in bed for four solid months.

I'd like to be able to give a blow by blow description of those four solid months. Unfortunately, I was under dope so much of the time that I know little about it. It was not pleasant. My arm laid like a log from the Petrified Forest, strapped into the machine that moved the joints with regular motion, and with each motion starting a dart of fire and mangling pain up to the shoulder. Needles entered the veins at the elbow and the armpit, and from bottles suspended almost to the ceiling to provide a pressurehead, plasma and blood-sustenance was trickled in to keep the arm alive.

Dimly I recall having the other arm strapped down and the waves of pain that blasted at me from both sides. The only way I kept from going out of my mind with the pain was living from hypo to hypo and waiting for the blessed blackness that wiped out the agony; only to come out of it hours later with my infection advanced to another point of pain. When the infection reached my right shoulder, it stopped for a long time; the infection rose up my left arm and also stopped at the shoulder. I came out of the dope to find James and his father fitting one of the manipulators to my right leg and through that I could feel the darting pains in my calf and thigh.

At those few times when my mind was clear enough to let me use my perception, I dug the room and found that I was lying in a veritable forest of bottles and rubber tubes and a swathe of bandages.

Utterly helpless, I vaguely knew that I was being cared for in every way. The periods of clarity were fewer, now, and shorter when they came.

I awoke once to find my throat paralyzed, and again to find that my jaw, tongue, and lower face was a solid pincushion of darting needles of fire. Later, my ears reported not a sound, and even later still I awoke to find myself strapped into a portable resuscitator that moved my chest up and down with an inexorable force.

That's about all I know of it. When the smoke cleared away completely and the veil across my eyes was gone, it was Spring outside and I was a Mekstrom.

I sat up in bed.

It was morning, the sun was streaming in the window brightly and the fresh morning air of Spring stirred the curtains gently. It was quite warm and the smell that came in from the outside was alive with newborn greenery. It felt good just to be alive.

The hanging bottles and festoons of rubber hose were gone. The crude manipulators had been stowed somewhere and the bottles of medicine and stuff were missing from the bureau. There wasn't even a thermometer in a gla.s.s anywhere within the range of my vision, and frankly I was so glad to be alive again that I did not see any point to digging through the joint with my perception to find the location of the medical junk.

Instead, I just wanted to get up and run.

I did take a swing at the clothes closet and found my stuff. Then I took a mild pa.s.s at the house, located the bathroom and also a.s.sured myself that no one was likely to interrupt me.

I was going to shave and shower and dress and go downstairs. I was just shrugging myself up and out of bed when Nurse Farrow came bustling up the stairs and into the room with no preamble.

"Hi!" I greeted her. "I was going to--"

"Surprise us," she said quickly. "I know. So I came up to see that you don't get into trouble."

"Trouble?" I asked, pausing on the edge of the bed.

"You're a Mekstrom, Steve," she told me unnecessarily. Then she caught my thought and went on: "It's necessary to remind you. You have to learn how to control your strength, Steve."

I flexed my arms. They didn't feel any different. I pinched my muscle with my other hand and it pinched just as it always had. I took a deep breath and the air went in pleasantly and come out again.

"I don't feel any different," I told her.

She smiled and handed me a common wooden lead pencil. "Write your name,"

she directed.

"Think I'll have to learn all over?" I grinned. I took the pencil, put my fist down on the top of the bureau above a pad of paper and chuckled at Farrow. "Now, let's see, my first initial is the letter 'S' made by starting at the top and coming around in a sweeping, graceful curve like this--"

It didn't come around in any curve. As the lead point hit the paper it bore down in, flicked off the tip, and then crunched down, breaking off the point and splintering the thin, whittled wood for about an eighth of an inch. The fact that I could not control it bothered me inside and I instinctively clutched at the shaft of the pencil. It cracked in three places in my hand; the top end with the eraser fell down over my wrist to the bureau top and rolled in a rapid rattle to the edge where it fell to the floor.

"See?" asked Farrow softly.

"But--?" I blundered uncertainly.

"Steve, your muscles and your nervous system have been stepped up proportionately. You've got to re-learn the coordination between the muscle-stimulus and the feedback information from the work you are doing."

I began to see what she meant. I remembered long years ago at school, when we'd been studying some of the new alloys and there had been a sample of a magnesium-lithium-something alloy that was machined into a smooth cylinder about four inches in diameter and a foot long. It looked like hard steel. People who picked it up for the first time invariably braced their muscles and set both hands on it. But it was so light that their initial effort almost tossed the bar through the ceiling, and even long after we all knew, it was hard not to attack the bar without using the experience of our mind and sense that told us that any bar of metal _that_ big had to be _that_ heavy.

I went to a chair. Farrow said, "Be careful," and I was. But it was no trick at all to take the chair by one leg at the bottom and lift it chin high.

"Now, go take your shower," she told me. "But Steve, please be careful of the plumbing. You can twist off the faucet handles, you know."

I nodded and turned to her, holding out a hand. "Farrow, you're a brick!"

She took my hand. It was not steel hard. It was warm and firm and pleasant. It was--holding hands with a woman.

Farrow stepped back. "One thing you'll have to remember," she said cheerfully, "is only to mix with your own kind from now on. Now go get that shower and shave. I'll be getting breakfast."

Showering was not hard and I remembered not to twist off the water-tap handles. Shaving was easy although I had to change razor blades three times in the process. I broke all the teeth out of the comb because it was never intended to be pulled through a thicket of piano wire.

Getting dressed was something else. I caught my heel in one trouser leg and shredded the cloth. I broke the buckle on my belt. My shoelaces went like parting a length of wet spaghetti. The b.u.t.ton on the top of my shirt pinched off and when I gave that final jerk to my necktie it pulled the knot down into something about the size of a pea.

Breakfast was very pleasant, although I bent the fork tines spearing a rasher of bacon and removed the handle of my coffee cup without half trying. After breakfast I discovered that I could not remove a cigarette from the package without pinching the end down flat, and after I succeeded in getting one into my mouth by treating both smoke and match as if they were made of tissue paper, my first drag on the smoke lit a howling furnace-fire on the end that consumed half of the cigarette in the first puff.