Sordman the Protector

BY TOM PURDOM
Illustrated by WOOD
He was the most powerful man in the world. He could make anybody do anything—and yet he was the slave of a mad criminal's mind!
In a beer hall on the eighty-first floor of the Hotel Mark Twain fourteen men held an adolescent girl prisoner.
I'll go up there by myself, Sordman said.
He was a big young man with sloppy black hair and a red beard. His fashionably ornate clothes covered the body of a first class Talent. Disciplined training, plus drugs and his natural gift, had made him one of the four truly developed psionic adepts in the world. With drugs and preparation, he could command the entire range of psi powers. Without drugs, he could sense the emotions and sometimes the general thought patterns of the people near him.
We'd better go with you, Lee Shawn said. There's an awful lot of fear up there. They'll kill you as soon as they learn you're a Talent.
She was a lean, handsome woman in her early forties. A lawyer-politician, she was the Guggenheim Foundation's lobbyist. For years she had fought against laws to outlaw the development of Talent.
Thanks, Mama, but I think I'd better go alone.
Sordman, though he didn't tell her, knew that symbolically Lee saw him as the tree and herself as the rain and the earth.
Go ahead and laugh, George Aaron said. But you'll need big medicine to fight that fear. Lee's symbolic place in your psyche is important.
I've thought it over, Sordman said. I'll depend on God and nothing else.