James Blish Jack of Eagles

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the psi faculties. Everybody has them in some degree, and I think you ve got a
large helping. I can show you how to use them, and Todd can help, too. Then
we d be even; it would be a convention of privacy between us. Each of us can
see, but whatever our curiosity about someone, we satisfy it only under
conditions laid down by the other. Married people don t peep through bathroom
keyholes in their own homes, after all.
No, Marla said. I don t want any part of it. If you really want me to
marry you, you ll have to give it up, Danny. I don t want to be a stinker
about it, but I can t help myself. It scares me too much.
How do you give up an ability? Danny asked, reasonably. It would be like
agreeing not to see without at the same time giving up my eyes. I m not even
sure it could be done. Surgery would be the only recourse, and even there it
would probably make an idiot of me, now that full cortical connections have
been established. And the surgeon would have to find the spot in my brain
where the master formula is and extirpate that; he could slash everything else
in my head, but if he missed that, I d still be a psi-man.
Marla said nothing. Danny added dubiously, You see how it is. But we could
make the agreement. And I could be careful not to throw furniture around or
teleport anything or carry the garbage out any way but by hand no
psychokinesis or ESP to be used around you, that d be the law. And it s highly
probable that I won t have a chance at a sigma-sequence ever again
Marla stamped her foot and turned her back on him.
Danny stood for a moment, swallowing, in a gray fog of desolation. He was
about to turn away when something came to him, something so desperate that it
left him shaking.
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Nothing he had ever had to do, nothing he had ever suffered, no fear he had
ever felt, cost him so much as this; but it was the only thing left to be
done.
Carefully, with the utmost precision, and with the utmost relentlessness
toward himself, he constructed in his own brain a phantom brain, an electronic
set which duplicated his every attitude, his every memory, his every
concept, his every impulse, even his every reflex and every buried circuitous
drive which was hidden from his own conscious sight. He left out nothing: the
sessions in the bathroom with the book; the theft from the purse of his
mother s guest; the pricking of the fat boy s treasured blimp-balloon; the
tethered dog whirling with B-B shot from a nearby window; every minutely
specific thought he had ever had about Marla; every lie; every disgrace; every
defeat. Everything.
And when he had the phantom construct complete, he moved it delicately out of
his own brain and into Marla s.
She seemed to shrink the moment it touched her. I ll kill you, she said
tonelessly. I ll kill you if you touch my mind again. Oh! Oh god I m going
crazy. Oh. I ll kill you. I ll kill you.
She put her hands to her face.
And so it had all come to nothing. An old motto said that familiarity breeds
contempt. Danny s attempt to breed love from it had collapsed; and he knew
that he should have expected nothing else. As he had built up the phantom
image of himself, his loathing for himself had grown too, until he was almost
ready to wonder why he should be allowed to live. Why had he expected Marla to
find the picture any more attractive? He had simply committed another
stupidity.
Marla seemed to be crying. He hesitated a moment longer, and then went back
into the apartment. The FBI man looked at him brightly.
No soap? he said. That s tough, Mr. Caiden. That little girl has a mind of
her own, as I seem to remember.
Shut up.
The FBI man shut up, but he shifted in the big chair and began handling his
papers with a certain inattention. It was painfully obvious that he wanted to
go out into the hall and re-try his own luck.
Then Danny heard her calling, in a small voice, through the door.
Danny. Danny.
I m here, he said.
Danny look at me. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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