"Never mind. You'll be going out again. Regularly. With me at first until you get patroling under control. And then on your own."
"Are we always hungry?" asked Fred Williams, taking another apple.
"It helps. The government would like us to be permanently at the point of death, but that is fortunately impractical. The less hold our bodies have, the easier it is to go out. There's one other point, though. And since you're coming with me on your training, I'd prefer you to know—no matter what the rules say. Whenever you go near another living being in a Dive, your mind can see the other mind, and you can read it from the pictures in it. It's difficult to describe, but you'll see for yourself. And if the mind you are looking at is connected up to a body, as we are now, and if the pictures don't seem to fit the situation, you can take it that they refer to events still in the future as far as that body is concerned. The mind has a different space-time existence from the body, obviously, and quite often it is ahead in time. That's why we have to be negative Psi. Anyone can Dive, but only a negative Psi can remain objective about other beings' minds. A Psi would collect other minds' contents and get them confused with his own—future and present all messed up, full of symbols—take a look at a Psi's mind sometime on the way back. There are a lot of accidental roamers around on Earth."
"If we can read other minds," Fred Williams said thoughtfully, "then we Divers could have a hell of a lot of power."
He was surprised when Pat laughed.
"We all think of that," she said, "but so did the Solar Government. We have a bunch of Psis and Security troops tracing us all the time when we're in the body. But the real hold on us is not that. How would you feel if you were told you could never Dive again?"
"I—I wouldn't like that."
"You see? And you've only been on the first experimental Dive. Imagine when it is your whole life."
Fred Williams nodded slowly.
Then he asked: "Where do you live?"