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.His face remained unchanged, although his eyes went moist and his throatwobbled somewhat.His wife and Esk watched him as a thin beading of sweatbroke out on his forehead.Ten seconds passed, and he was obviously out to breaksome heroic record.There may have been steam curling out of his ears, but thatcould have been a rumour.His fingers drummed a strange tattoo on the bartop.At last he swallowed, appeared to reach a decision, turned solemnly to Esk,and said, Hwarl,ish finish saaarghs ishghs oorgsh? His brow wrinkled as he ran the sentence past his mind again and made asecond attempt. Aargh argh shaah gok? He gave up. Bharrgsh nargh! His wife snorted and took the glass out of his unprotesting hand.She sniffedit.She looked at the barrels, all ten of them.She met his unsteady eye.In a pri-vate paradise for two they soundlessly calculated the selling price of six hundredgallons of triple-distilled white mountain peach brandy and ran out of numbers.Mrs Skiller was quicker on the uptake than her husband.She bent down andsmiled at Esk, who was too tired to squint back.It wasn t a particularly goodsmile, because Mrs Skiller didn t get much practice. How did you get here, little girl? she said, in a voice that suggested ginger-bread cottages and the slamming of big stove doors. I got lost from Granny. And where s Granny now, dear? Clang went the oven doors again; it wasgoing to be a tough night for all wanderers in metaphorical forests. Just somewhere, I expect. Would you like to go to sleep in a big feather bed, all nice and warm? Esk looked at her gratefully, even while vaguely realizing that the woman hada face just like an eager ferret, and nodded.You re right.It s going to take more than a passing woodchopper to sort thisout.Granny, meanwhile, was two streets away.She was also, by the standards ofother people, lost.She would not see it like that.She knew where she was, it was60 just that everywhere else didn t.It has already been mentioned that it is much harder to detect a human mindthan, say, the mind of a fox.The human mind, seeing this as some kind of a slur,wants to know why.This is why.Animal minds are simple, and therefore sharp.Animals never spend time di-viding experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they ve missed.The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to(a) mate with, (b) eat, /c/ run away from, and /d) rocks.This frees the mind fromunnecessary thoughts and gives it a cutting edge where it matters.Your normalanimal, in fact, never tries to walk and chew gum at the same time.The average human, on the other hand, thinks about all sorts of things aroundthe clock, on all sorts of levels, with interruptions from dozens of biological cal-endars and timepieces.There s thoughts about to be said, and private thoughts,and real thoughts, and thoughts about thoughts, and a whole gamut of subcon-scious thoughts.To a telepath the human head is a din.It is a railway terminuswith all the Tannoys talking at once.It is a complete FM waveband and someof those stations aren t reputable, they re outlawed pirates on forbidden seas whoplay late-night records with limbic lyrics.Granny, trying to locate Esk by mind magic alone, was trying to find a strawin a haystack.She was not succeeding, but enough blips of sense reached her through theheterodyne wails of a thousand brains all thinking at once to convince her that theworld was, indeed, as silly as she had always believed it was.She met Hilta at the corner of the street.She was carrying her broomstick, thebetter to conduct an aerial search (with great stealth, however; the men of Ohulanwere right behind Stay Long Ointment but drew the line at flying women).Shewas distraught. Not so much as a hint of her, said Granny. Have you been down to the river? She might have fallen in! Then she d have just fallen out again.Anyway, she can swim.I think she shiding, drat her. What are we going to do? Granny gave her a withering look. Hilta Goatfounder, I m ashamed of you,acting like a cowin.Do I look worried? Hilta peered at her. You do.A bit.Your lips have gone all thin. I m just angry, that s all. Gypsies always come here for the fair, they might have taken her. Granny was prepared to believe anything about city folk but here she was onfirmer ground.61 Then they re a lot dafter than I d give them credit for, she snapped. Look,she s got the staff. What good would that do? said Hilta, who was close to tears
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