He started talking without asking for a parley.
"Two men died yesterday. I've come to hunt out the murderer and put him away. What's the evidence against this girl?"
"We found drugs and a divining rod in her room."
"She's had a reputation for a long time."
"The school kids say she's a daydreamer."
Sordman understood their fear. Psi was a new and dangerous force. Its use demanded moral and intellectual discipline. Only a rare and carefully developed personality could encounter the anger, hostility and fear in other minds and still retain compassion and reasonable respect for human beings. An undisciplined person panicked and went into a mental state approaching paranoia. Sordman fought panic every day. He fought it with a total acceptance of human motivations, cultivated tenderness and compassion, and a healthy ego which could accept and enjoy its own self-love.
Those things, Sordman would have said, and also the necessary grace of God.
But the most undisciplined personality could practice psi destructively. Hostile minds roamed the world. Death could strike you in a clear field beneath an open sky while your murderer lay home in his bed. No wonder they dragged a girl from her parents and bullied her till dawn.
They talked. Sordman picked his way through fourteen minds. As always, he found what he wanted.