I ended up staying on with the band; even if Tommy and his two sycophants were major irritants, we all had to stay together. I wasn't about to leave Wish; Wish wasn't about to leave me; neither was she about to leave Tommy, because there was strength in unity. We were all in this together by then; we'd either hang together, or we'd all hang separately, to paraphrase an old saying. One of Castevet's favorite tactics was to divide and conquer; if we split up, we'd be more vulnerable to his machinations...so we stuck together.

Therefore, slowly and hesitantly, I learned to get along with Tommy, and he learned to get along with me, which reduced everyone's stress levels markedly in itself. I also learned to short-circuit Tony's practical jokes before he got a chance to pull most of them, which reduced the nerve-jangle levels for all of us even more; being able to eavesdrop on his thoughts while he was plotting his next bit of deviltry was immensely helpful in this, but I didn't indulge in it on a regular basis because I discovered something on my own that Wish and Tommy already knew from their own experiences: Poking around in the minds of others can be an ugly and painful experience. People carry a lot of baggage in their minds---pain, bad memories, nightmares, terrors, hatreds, lusts that go so far beyond ugly in places that there are no words for them, and things that there aren't even conventional terms for. The old saw about all of us having demons gnawing at our souls is a lot truer than most people suspect; I know---I've run afoul of my share of them over the years. It's one thing to theorize about why a serial killer commits murder after murder; it's another thing entirely to find yourself immersed in the very slime and ugliness that causes people to behave like that...and it's not always possible to get away from such an encounter completely unaffected.

The bottom line to being a telepath is that you tread carefully, wherever you go in someone else's mind. If you don't, something really nasty-ugly-deadly can rear up unexpectedly and rip your head off before you even know you're in danger.

It was because of all this that Wish and I prevailed upon Tommy to teach me that solid-as-a-rock mental shield of his; it was something of a surprise to be informed that I already had a natural mental shield of my own, and that all I really needed to do was learn how to improve on what I already had.

It was there that I found what Castevet had been looking for in me, back there on the beach in Malibu; he'd been looking for some sign of intelligence greater than the brain-dead surfer dude image I was projecting at the time...and he hadn't been able to find it because of my shield. It's hard to make a worthwhile ally of someone who has the IQ of roadkill, no matter how powerful a Psi he might be...and my dumb act had just convinced him that I wasn't all that worth cultivating as an ally. He couldn't see past my surfer-dude camouflage...which astounded me, when I finally found out what was really going on. I hadn't even realized what I was doing---and it'd probably saved my hide.

Tommy did his best to teach me that shield of his, but I found out that most of his shield is innate---caused by some aspect of the neural hard-wiring in his brain that I just don't have. It's a little like computer technology; you can duplicate some aspects of hardware behavior with software, but no matter how sophisticated a computer program is, it can't duplicate all aspects of the hardware side of computer technology; if the basic hardware necessary to the function isn't hard-wired into your system, no software in the world is going to let you do what you want to. That was how it was with me and Tommy's shield; I eventually go to the point where I could shield myself almost as well as he could, and even fight back pretty effectively, but I never could achieve that concrete-bunker shield of his any more than Wish or the Professor could...and that mental banshee-scream of his was completely beyond me. He was just born with cerebral equipment that we weren't; it was as simple as that.

On the other hand, I did learn how to do that camouflage-shield thing that Wish was so good at; I'd been doing it all along without even knowing it, but she was at least able to teach me how to do it better. I don't affect the airhead disguise that Wish employed for so long, of course; I still look and sound like the me everyone else is used to, even when someone tries a light probe of my mind - what they see is just an ordinary guy, thinking ordinary thoughts - but down deeper, I'm watching everything they do and thinking things they can't detect because of the "blind" between them and what's really going on in my mind. It's a useful ability to have, at times...and it's saved my life - and Wish's life - more than once.

And just as importantly, Wish and I began a subtle campaign of mental suggestion that slowly - but surely - began whittling away at Razor's flat-out-offensive personality and began to reshape him into something a little closer to human...and more humane as well. It wasn't easy, but it was necessary; one thing we didn't need was someone murdering Tommy's best friend in his sleep one night.

I don't think anyone ever understood why Tommy and Razor ended up best friends; in a lot of ways, the combination was as improbable as Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler becoming drinking buddies. Like they say, there's no accounting for tastes.