I shouldn't tell you this story, my friend. What has happened to me might happen to you also, if I do. Yes, I know I look well enough. It doesn't show - yet. But as the doctor said, it's a matter of balance.

What doctor? Okay, I can see you want to listen. If you'll be kind enough to buy us another round, then, I'll start from the beginning...

I found the doctor in this same place. I came here, like you, in a mood for conviviality. I arrived a bit earlier than usual. The place was nearly empty, but the bartender (Flynn, over there) was busy cleaning glasses and such, preparing for the Happy Hour rush, and wasn't being very talkative.

So I looked around, and saw this quiet little fellow sitting alone in a booth, nursing a Scotch. He looked like he could use some companionship, so I carried my glass over to his table and invited myself to join him. He didn't object. He almost seemed to have been expecting me. That was the first thing that struck me as queer. I'd never seen him before.

He mumbled a greeting in such a subdued voice that I couldn't make out the words, but it seemed like an "As you will, help yourself," kind of mumble, so I sat down across from him. He wore a light gray suit, well cut but very rumpled, and his tie was loosened and askew. It looked like he might have been living in the same clothes for weeks. His thin hair was tousled. His face was flushed, apparently from drinking, and he'd missed shaving for at least a day or two. His pale hands were abstractedly tracing figures in the moisture from his glass on the table top.

At first he didn't look up at all. Just nursed his Scotch and let me ramble about the weather, the early hour, and why I'd happened to come in. Then I asked him why he was there so early in the day himself.

For a long while he didn't reply, just kept staring into his glass as if he hadn't heard me, or didn't want to. I began to get uncomfortable, and started to apologize.

"Look," I said, "I didn't mean to intrude. You don't have to answer my question. If you don't want my company just nod, and I'll move someplace else. It's just that you didn't seem to mind when I sat down here..."

I let my voice trail off, because as I spoke he looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary, like he hadn't slept for days, but in spite of that they held mine with such a compelling intensity that I couldn't turn away. And something in that look made anything more I might have said superfluous. It was as if he knew me, and knew my thoughts better than I knew them myself.

Finally, he spoke.

"No, it's okay," he said. "I really don't mind your company. And since you're in a mood to listen, I don't mind telling you why I'm here."

He raised his hand to Jeannie, the bar girl, for a refill. "Let me," I volunteered. Then he began to talk. As he talked, he continued to nurse his Scotch, and I my beer, and Jeannie kept us both supplied with scarcely an interruption. In the end, this strange little man had affected me so deeply that I picked up the whole tab. I should warn you, you might wind up feeling the same. If you don't mind that, I'll tell you his story. It may take all night; it did when he told me.

He spoke very quietly, but clearly. I never missed a word, in spite of the Happy Hour noise that began to build around us. And his voice never changed, though he must have put away more than a fifth of Scotch while we sat here.

Not a soul interrupted us, either, although many of the people who were in and out of here that night were close friends of mine. I didn't begin to understand why until later.

His story started back a bit. Several months, in fact. He had been working for a software company, in a research lab. His job was to develop some refinements in computer speech recognition, to give the company's software products an edge in that field.

The company had already made a killing with their earlier products. There was no shortage of funding for his efforts. His credentials were good. He'd come into the study of computer codes from a background in semantics. He had taken his doctorate in that. The company had given him pretty much carte blanche in putting together his equipment.

So he got the best. His approach was to digitize speech sounds at the highest possible sampling rate. He didn't want to miss any overtones or nuances. His premise was that once he understood what was significant and what wasn't, he could simplify the sampling system. But for his research, until he knew what was important, he wanted to miss as little as possible.

For the same reason, he didn't use just one microphone. He didn't want his data distorted by the microphone's response characteristics. So he recorded on several channels, with a variety of different microphones, both electromagnetic and electrostatic pickup types. And again he got the best, all designed for flat response to several times the accepted range of human hearing.

Remember what I'm telling you. This wasn't prescience on his part or anything of the sort. His theory at the time was that there might be characteristics in the overtones we don't think we hear that would help simplify the speech recognition patterns. He had no notions of what he would find beyond that.

For analysis of the digitized speech patterns, he had programmed up some very precise Fourier Analysis algorithms. The results of that would be run through some high-powered search and sort routines to show up any important similarities or differences. And he had access to the company's high-speed mainframes for processing power. It seemed he was all set.

He made digitized recordings of some representative speech samples, then he ran them through the analysis program, and began studying the results. The results were encouraging. With his data, he could prove that every different word has its own unique signature. Even homonyms could be distinguished in meaning by their overtones.

But the data was complex, and the overtones he was finding were in a range beyond what is considered to be the normal hearing range. Unless he could find some way to simplify it, the only way to use what he had come up with would be to duplicate his expensive equipment.

Up to this point he'd been working in English. For obvious practical reasons, English had to be the target language for this project. But English is semantically complex, compared to, say, Spanish. And a secondary goal of the project would be a speech translation program. So he decided to try his analysis on some Spanish text samples, to see if the results would be any easier to deal with. I don't know what sentences he used, but he was a linguist as well as a semanticist, and he was fluent in Spanish and several other languages besides English. So he read all the samples himself. Most of them were just Spanish renderings of his English samples.

This is where he got his first big surprise. It was really something of an accident that he ran into this at all. He'd intended to just have the computer compare the Spanish samples, and leave the English data base out of the sort, to shorten the run time. But he accidentally entered a global command that told it to search everything. And he got match-ups! On a seventh order Fourier harmonic, the English sentences and the same sentences said in Spanish were nearly identical!

He couldn't understand it. There was a certain amount of homophonic similarity between some of the Spanish and English words in some of those sentences, of course. But the matches were much more extensive than that could account for. There was no obvious reason why the analysis should have found that many matches anywhere in the spectrum.

Without some theory to explain this phenomenon, he didn't even dare report it. It would have been impossible to work with. But if he could crack it, the possibilities seemed endless. He worked over the data time after time, trying to find a clue to the harmonic match-ups. He ran his samples in other languages. The results were the same! German, Italian, Greek, even Japanese; there were minor variations, but that same seventh harmonic seemed to match as well as the meanings of the sentences matched. It almost seemed as if the microphones were picking up the unvoiced concepts from inside his head!

He discarded that impossible thought, and decided to concentrate on simplifying his data. Which of his bank of microphones were picking up the matching harmonics? One by one, he disconnected different microphones from his inputs, each time rereading his sentence samples. He narrowed it down to just two, one dynamic and one condenser, the highest quality model that he had of each type. With both, he could still get his results. With either one disconnected, the results were ambiguous.

By this time he'd gone without food or sleep for nearly two days. But at last he felt that he was getting somewhere. Still in the chair at his desk, the microphones at his elbows, his equipment still running, he put his head on his arms and fell into an exhausted sleep.

He woke a few hours later. His head was still buzzing, but the feeling of exhaustion had rolled back, overridden by hunger. He went out to find something to eat.

A short time later he was sitting at a nearby fast food place, cleaning up the last of his french fries, a hamburger that he had nearly swallowed whole making a lump in his shrunken stomach. The nourishment was beginning to work, though, and his light-headedness started to dissipate. As his mind began to function more normally, he realized that he hadn't turned off his recorders. He dashed out of the restaurant, with a feeble hope that he had at least disconnected from his computer link. All that wasted run-time! Even with his open budget, he couldn't afford that!

In minutes he was back in his lab, and his worst fears were realized. Disgusted with himself, he punched up a readout of what the computer had run since he'd fallen asleep. He was about to give it a command to delete it all when he noticed that it seemed to have reported some analysis results. For a crazy second that didn't seem possible, then he remembered that he'd set up a subroutine to automatically run the sentences he read through the analysis and search routines, to save himself the trouble while he was experimenting with the microphones.

Suddenly curious, he looked at the time tags on the files. Sure enough, a whole series of them had been recorded and analyzed while he was asleep! He was reluctant to erase them without knowing what was there, so he ran a quick file search to see if any of the analyses reported match-ups.

Even as he did it, he thought to himself that he would never be doing such an idiotic thing if he wasn't still a little fuzz- headed. But the search came back positive! There was not just one, but several indications of seventh harmonic match-ups!

Now he didn't know what to think. He must have been talking in his sleep, repeating the sentences he had been reading for his tests. He ran back the voice recordings at fast-forward search. There were a few snoring sessions and occasional snorts and mumbles, but outside of that nothing but the steady sound of regular breathing. What had the computer been analyzing?

He was almost ready to take his earlier wild thoughts seriously. He took the analyses of his "sleep session" recordings, and ran a comparison against his earlier spoken sessions. And he got matches! He was able to identify the "sentences" in the sleep recordings which had been analyzed as matching. And he was able to trace the analyses back to the exact corresponding time intervals on his recordings - to find that he could hear nothing but his own breathing on those sections of track!

He was sitting at his desk as he made the analysis. When he got this result, he leaned forward on his elbows and dropped his head into his hands, closing his eyes in weariness and frustration. Then he opened them, and there, sitting on the desk top, looming in his field of vision inches from his forehead, right where they had been while he slept, were his two most sensitive microphones.

The conclusion now seemed inescapable. Somehow, the microphones were picking up his thoughts. Or at least some electronic manifestation that corresponded to his thought patterns. But would the data he had collected demonstrate this incredible result convincingly to his employers? He feared that it wouldn't. It would be too easy for them to believe he had faked the tracks rather than accept the incredible truth. He needed a more direct demonstration.

So he worked up a modification to his analysis program that would generate a real-time graphics display of the significant harmonics that could be viewed on the monitor screen. He ran it, and sat there watching the computer read his thoughts! He went back through all his material, comparing the graphics displays of spoken and unspoken versions, until he was sure there could be no doubt.

But as he thought more about actually demonstrating his findings to others, he realized that everything he had done so far he had done himself. What if the effect were somehow peculiar to him alone? He needed to find out. He needed to test the effect on others before he could safely make it known.

He had worked alone in his lab so far, but there were plenty of other people around. He asked for volunteers among the other employees, ostensibly just to get recordings of various voices. But he had each of them "rehearse" each sentence silently before reading it aloud, and he watched the monitor off to one side.

His fears that his own patterns might be unique were quickly laid to rest. The graphics displays were uniformly recognizable from person to person. There were differences, which had him puzzled until he realized that the differences were consistent. People who volunteered happily and seemed to enjoy participating in his experiments showed one variation; people who had to be coaxed into helping out and seemed bored with the task of reading the sentences showed another. Within the two groups, the patterns were the same. He went back through his own earlier recordings, and sure enough, his mood shifts were apparent to him now; here excited at his progress, here tired from long hours of tedious reading. The recordings were registering not only the meaning of sentences, but emotional nuances as well!

Then came another surprise. He was by now well acquainted with the display patterns of all his sample sentences, and could recognize what sentences his volunteers were about to speak from the display as they silently rehearsed. This was not surprising to him, and he scarcely took note of it. But this time he had a young secretary reading for him who had been among the "bored" group the first time she came in, and was even less interested now. She was wondering how long he would keep her here, and was getting edgy because she didn't want to miss her coffee break. He said, "Just a few more sentences, we'll easily be done before your break time," and it was only the wide-eyed stare she gave him that made him realize that she had not voiced that thought, he had read it from the screen! He did his best to hide his own surprise and excitement, and decided he would have to watch himself carefully after that.

Afraid again that it might have been a fluke, a pattern combination that registered subconsciously because it was similar to one of his sample sentences, he began to watch the screen closely while others of his subjects were at the microphones. Far from being a fluke, he discovered that it became easier and easier to read peoples thoughts from the screen. This was something far beyond his original goal of a computer voice recognition program. What he had now was a form of computer- assisted mental telepathy!

But it didn't stop there. In his excitement over the broad implications of his discoveries, he almost didn't notice the first time he read someone's thoughts without looking at the screen. The first time it happened, his subject was sitting at the microphones as usual, and he was attuned to the expectation of "reading" the subject's thoughts. A simple momentary distraction had drawn his attention away from the monitor display. It wasn't until he looked back at the screen that he realized that he hadn't "seen" the thoughts he had just picked up. When he did realize it, he sat there stunned for a moment. Then he quietly turned off the monitor and continued to read his subject's mind without its assistance for a few minutes.

When he recovered his composure, he dismissed his volunteer early, and sat alone immersed in thought. Biofeedback, he concluded. Continuous practice with the monitor had somehow sensitized him, reinforced a latent ability. Having explained the new phenomenon with a hypothesis he could accept, he decided to test it further. He left his lab, and went to sit quietly in the company cafeteria.

People came and went, and he monitored the thoughts of those who sat closest to him. He just got their surface thoughts, the ones they were on the verge of vocalizing, but now that he knew he could do it he began to pick them up with an embarrassing ease. Too embarrassing. Before long he felt obliged to go back to his lab to avoid them, even though they couldn't know that he was aware of those thoughts they thought better of speaking.

Alone in his lab, his excitement grew at the prospects before him. Now he had not just dramatic visual evidence that his programs could distinguish meaning in any language, even unvoiced thoughts, but he could himself demonstrate the biofeedback potential for developing latent telepathy. He began working on a report for the company, and thinking about what the next phase of this work should be, and where it could take them.

On his way out to go home that evening, his mind was still astir with thoughts of how he would make his presentation. Approaching the security guard at the front desk, he realized that in his preoccupation he had forgotten to lock up his lab. As he passed the desk, he registered the guard's "Good night, Doc," and his offer to lock up for him on his rounds. He was out the door before he realized that neither of them had spoken a word.

His own double-take was mirrored in the face of the guard when he turned and looked back at him. Stunned once again by this new development, he turned away and hurried home, trying to quiet his thoughts. More than once he detected puzzled reactions in passersby. He could not completely suppress it; now he was sending as well as receiving!

The next few days were hell for him. He had to try not to allow thoughts to surface in the presence of others, or if they did, to speak them aloud before the others realized they knew what he was thinking. And his receptiveness to the thoughts of others increased, until it became a ceaseless, unbearable tirade. Finally he retreated to his home, and resorted to wrapping aluminum foil around his head in an attempt to shield himself from his neighbors.

His hope at that point was that he would get used to it, get control of his own sending and limit his receiving. After all, if the talent had been latent all his life as he suspected, he had suppressed it successfully until now. And he did have some success. The feedback of picking up his own thoughts from others helped him learn to control his sending.

This all sounds exciting to you, doesn't it? Yes, think of it, a world of people able to exchange thoughts at will. I was excited too, at first. Think of the advantages. But now think again. Think of the disadvantages. What would happen if you could hide your thoughts from no one, and no one could hide their thoughts from you? The doctor thought about it. He thought about this latent ability he had brought to the surface in himself. If it were latent now in all men, had it ever in the past been active? And if it had, when had it become suppressed?

He thought about the distant past, when men lived as small bands of hunters. Man, a weak and defenseless species compared to the great cats, the wolves, and other hunting beasts. Could it be that it was telepathy, more than intelligence, that was the survival faculty man's brain endowed him with, and which had allowed him to compete successfully in the hunt? What an advantage such direct communication could have for a band of primitive hunters!

But then that very success would lead to growing populations, infringement on the territories of other tribes. Would there have been battles for supremacy, or would their telepathy have allowed them to work together, perhaps to join in building great cities?

He remembered the story of the tower of Babel, and thought about the possible grain of truth at the heart of the legend. Could it be that all men did indeed share a common telepathic language at one time, perhaps the precursor of the great Indo- European "Mother Tongue" that linguists long had posited? And did they find the babel of so many minds to be too much for them when their population density increased from scattered tribes to larger and larger cities? Could it be that the ability, once useful, had been suppressed out of survival necessity in these new circumstances? Was this the unused talent of man's great brain that science had for so long wondered about, that unused ninety percent of his mental capacity? Was not some of this talent evident between every mother and her infant child? And was it the mothers who unconsciously taught their young ones to suppress the ability, to use speech instead, as they grew older? Could it not be that this telepathy he was experiencing was a natural talent, to be numbered among other innate abilities of "natural" man that had fallen victim to the "civilizing" forces of man's social cultures over the ages?

To the doctor, living within the mental din of his own immediate experience, there was little room for doubt. He concluded that his proven talent for languages was evidence that, in himself at least, the latent talent was closer to the surface than it is allowed to be in most of us. Perhaps in his linguistic training he had brought it even more to the fore, so that he had been particularly susceptible to the awakening of it which his computer experiments, especially the graphics biofeedback, had encouraged.

He never returned to his lab, never made his report to the company of his findings. Once cracked, the mental barriers continued to fall, and as the din grew worse, he became more and more preoccupied with suppressing it. Metal shielding, which had at first given him some hope, ultimately proved futile. He had papered all the walls and windows of his apartment with aluminum foil, and grounded it to the water pipes, but the electrical component of telepathy that his microphones had picked up proved to be the weakest part of a more subtle wave that penetrated every form of shielding he could improvise as though it were cheesecloth.

In despair, he turned to alcohol. For a week he stayed alone in his apartment and did little else than drink. The effect on his telepathic reception was minimal, but it was more effective in dulling his sensibilities about it. The alcohol finally reduced the impact of being permanently tuned in to the thoughts of everyone near him to about the level of several different radio channels blaring simultaneously.

That's when he came here. In the midst of all that telepathic noise, he had become lonely. Lonely for someone to understand his plight, longing for some spark of hope, perhaps, that someone else could help him solve his dilemma. But looking, I think now more than anything, for someone to say goodbye to. For he had found his own solution. He only needed the courage to employ it.

His plan was to find, somewhere on earth, a location remote enough that the noise would go away. He would return to the primitive conditions in which telepathy had been a boon rather than a curse. But first, he wanted to tell someone his story. And he chose me.

And I, in turn, have chosen you. In both cases, as you will recognize, it has been really a mutual choice. I had become a bit despondent about my slow progress at my own programming job, and truth be told I was looking for someone worse off than myself, to help me feel better about it. You know what your own reasons are for being here.

It was at about this same point in his narrative that the doctor made me aware of something I hadn't realized before then. From the time I sat down, he hadn't spoken a single word aloud. But he had possessed my attention so utterly that I had not even noticed. And I, in turn, have not spoken a single word aloud to you. That's right, you see now that it's true, don't you?

You see, receiving his thoughts directly for that entire evening as I did somehow sensitized me, broke down my barriers, if you will. The doctor had not known that would occur, did not know it had, in fact, when he left in search of isolation.

I can't claim that degree of innocence. But I did warn you when we began. And I still hold some hope that the doctor's hypothesis has merit; that, being a linguist, he was more than normally susceptible. I am not the linguist that he was, but I am a programmer. So I have shown a knack for languages of a sort. Perhaps I, too, had less of a barrier against our true native language than most.

I leave that to you to decide. I, like the doctor, have had all I can take of the mental noise of our "civilized" world. My balance, too, has tipped too far. I think the doctor's solution is the only one possible for me as well: to escape the babel of our Mother Tongue, and search for solitude.

My one hope is that, if you do now become a telepath in turn, you will prove more able than we have to control it. Perhaps you may even find a way to bring this long-buried talent back to the aid of mankind.

Goodbye, my friend.

It's up to you now.

***