TIME PRESSURE

Long-range sequel to Mindkiller (1982), even less convincing than the original and with no new ideas at all. Sam, an independent-minded hippie loosely associated with the various aging-hippie communities of southern Nova Scotia, goes out into a snowstorm to retrieve a lost article--and witnesses the arrival of a mysterious egg-shaped device containing a naked woman! Rachel, who wears an odd metallic headband, displays strange powers; and Sam suspects she's visiting from the future. But what does she want? Is she benevolent or evil? And can she read minds? Rachel is evasive, although she does join with Sam in ecstatic lovemaking, occasionally including Sam's friends Snaker and Ruby. Then Sam discovers that Rachel has been influencing his mind with her computerized headband, and he steels himself to kill her. Instead, Snaker shoots Sam! From here on, things become daft. Up in the future, you see, telepathy has been perfected and nearly everyone has been joined into a supermind. Some of the supermind-ers have decided that it would be a jolly good idea if people from the past--Earth's billions of dead--were also given the opportunity to join the supermind. Hence Rachel, time-travelling back on a fact-finding mission. The supermind-ers, then, collect Sam's astro-travelling mind (yes, he really is dead), fit him out with a new, cloned body and send him back to live out his life in a way that avoids temporal disruptions. Some nice passages about country life, but the rest--from aging, hippie psychobabble to absurd life-after-death/time-travel shenanigans--is twaddle.