Ever since he had first set foot into his mind, some ten hours ago, they had been on his trail, but for some reason he had been unable to bring himself to go back and find out who they were and what they wanted. Hence he was as vexed with himself as he was with them.
After resting for a few minutes, he descended the hill and started across the Deneb 1 wasteland. It was a remarkably detailed materialization, and his quarry's footprints stood out clearly in the duplicated sand.
Sabrina York did not even know the rudiments of the art of throwing off a mind-tracker. It would have done her but little good if she had, for twelve years as a psycheye had taught Blake all the tricks. Probably she had taken it for granted that the mere act of hiding out in her tracker's mind was in itself a sufficient guarantee of her safety. After all, she had no way of knowing that he had discovered her presence.
Mind-country was as temporally inconsecutive as it was topographically incongruous, so Blake was not surprised when the Deneb 1 wasteland gave way to an expanse of boyhood meadow. Near the meadow was the house where Blake had lived at a much later date. In reality, the places were as far apart in miles as they were in years, but here in the country of his mind they existed side by side, surrounded by heterogeneous landscapes from all over the civilized sector of the galaxy and by the sharply demarcated spectra of a hundred different suns. A few of the suns were in the patchwork sky—Sirius, for example, and its twinkling dwarf companion. Most of them, however, were present only in their remembered radiance. To add to the confusion, scattered night memories interrupted the hodge-podge horizon with columns of darkness, and here and there the gray column of a dawn or dusk memory showed.
The house was flanked on one side by a section of a New Earth spaceport and on the other by an excerpt of an Ex-earth city-block. Behind it flowed a brief blue stretch of Martian waterway.
Sabrina's footsteps led up to the front door, and the door itself was ajar. Perhaps she was still inside. Perhaps she was watching him even now through one of the remembered windows. He scanned them with a professional eye, but saw no sign of her.
Warily he stepped inside, adjusting the temperature of his all-weather jacket to the remembered air-conditioning. His father was sitting in the living room, smoking, and watching 3V. He had no awareness of Blake. At Blake's entry he went right on smoking and watching as though the door had neither opened nor closed. He would go right on smoking and watching till Blake died and the conglomeration of place-times that constituted Blake's mind-world ceased to be. Ironically, he was watching nothing. The 3V program that had been in progress at the time of the unconscious materialization had failed to come through.