Chapter 2

Potts's chair overturned as he thrust himself up. He placed his thin hands on the desk and said, "You psychiatrists can't see an inch in front of your nose! All you can do is quote a textbook. If anybody mentions mental telepathy, or predicting the future, or a sense of perception, you classify them as insane. You think you've reduced the mind to a set of rules, but you're still in kindergarten! I'll prove every word I said! I'll vanish into the future! I can't change the past, but the future hasn't happened yet! I can imagine my own!"

Joe grabbed the fist that Potts shook under the doctor's nose and pinned the patient's arms behind his back.

"Take him upstairs to Ward K, Joe," Dr. Bean said. "To the pack room. That should calm him."

"So long, moron!" Potts called.

"Let's go, Orville Potts," Joe said. "We're going to fix you up just like an ice cream soda."

"You won't pack me in ice," Potts promised. His thin body twisted in pain.

He closed his eyes tight and concentrated.

Joe's great hands clamped into fists when Potts disappeared.

* * * * *

Potts opened his eyes. He lay face down on a padded acceleration couch with broad straps across his brawny back and legs. Before his face, a second hand swept around a clock toward a red zero. Potts twisted his head slightly in the harness and looked at the beautiful young woman strapped to the couch on his right. A shrieking warning siren blared through the spaceship.

The woman smiled.

"Hia, ked," she said in strange new accents. "Secure your dentures. Next stop, Alpha Centaurus!"

End of Project Gutenberg's A Thought For Tomorrow, by Robert E. Gilbert