[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy October
1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_I was psick of Psi powers, not having any. Or didn't I? Maybe
they'd psee otherwise psomeday!_
I walked into the dining room and collided with a floating mass of
fabric, which promptly draped itself over me like a sentient shroud.
"Oh, for God's sake, Kevin!" my middle brother's voice came muffled
through the folds. "If you can't help, at least don't hinder!"
I managed to struggle out of the tablecloth, even though it seemed to
be trying to wrap itself around me. When Danny got excited, he lost his
mental grip.
"I could help," I yelled as soon as I got my head free, "if anybody
would let me and, what's more, I could set the table a damn sight
faster by hand than you do with 'kinesis."
Just then Father appeared at the head of the table. He could as easily
have walked downstairs as teleported, but I belonged to a family of
exhibitionists. And Father tended to show off as if he were still a
kid. Not that he looked his age--he was big and blond, like Danny and
Tim and me, and could have passed for our older brother.
"Boys, boys!" he reproved us. "Danny, you ought to be ashamed of
yourself--picking on poor Kev."
Even if it hadn't been Danny's fault, he would still have been blamed.
Nobody was ever supposed to raise a voice or a hand or a thought to
poor afflicted Kev, because nature had picked on me enough. And the
nicer everybody was to me, the nastier I became, since only when they
lost their tempers could I get--or so I believed--their true attitude
toward me.
How else could I tell?
"Sorry, fella," Dan apologized to me. The tablecloth spread itself out
on the table. "Wrinkles," he grumbled to himself. "Wrinkles. And I had
it so nice and smooth before. Mother will be furious."
"If she were going to be furious, she'd be furious already," Father
reminded him sadly. It must be tough to be married to a deep-probe
telepath, I thought, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for him. It
was so seldom I got the chance to feel sorry for anyone except myself.
"But I think you'll find she understands."
"She knows, all right," Danny remarked as he went on into the kitchen,
"but I'm not sure she always understands."
I was surprised to find him so perceptive on the abstract level,
because he wasn't what you might call an understanding person, either.
* * * * *
"There are tensions in this room," my sister announced as she slouched
in, not quite awake yet, "and hatred. I could feel them all the way
upstairs. And today I'm working on the Sleepsweet Mattress copy, so I
must feel absolutely tranquil. Everyone will think beautiful thoughts,
please."
She sat down just as a glass of orange juice was arriving at her
place; Danny apparently didn't know she'd come in already. The glass
bumped into the back of her neck, tilted and poured its contents over
her shoulder and down her very considerable decolletage. Being a mere
primitive, I couldn't help laughing.
"Danny, you fumbler!" she screamed.
Danny erupted from the kitchen. "How many times have I asked all of you
not to sit down until I've got everything on the table? Always a lot of
interfering busybodies getting in the way."
"I don't see why you have to set the table at all," she retorted. "A
robot could do it better and faster than you. Even Kev could." She
turned quickly toward me. "Oh, I am sorry, Kevin."
I didn't say anything; I was too busy pressing my hands down on the
back of the chair to make my knuckles turn white.
Sylvia's face turned even whiter. "Father, stop him--_stop_ him! He's
hating again! I can't stand it!"
Father looked at me, then at her. "I don't think he can help it,
Sylvia."
I grinned. "That's right--I'm just a poor atavism with no control over
myself a-tall."
Finally my mother came in from the kitchen; she was an old-fashioned
woman and didn't hold with robocooks. One quick glance at me gave her
the complete details, even though I quickly protested, "It's illegal to
probe anyone without permission."
"I used to probe you to find out when you needed your diapers changed,"
she said tartly, "and I'll probe you now. You should watch yourself,
Sylvia--poor Kevin isn't responsible."
She didn't need to probe to get the blast of naked emotion that spurted
out from me. My sister screamed and even Father looked uncomfortable.
Danny stomped back into the kitchen, muttering to himself.
Mother's lips tightened. "Sylvia, go upstairs and change your dress.
Kevin, do I have to make an appointment for you at the clinic again?"
A psychiatrist never diagnosed members of his own family--that is, not
officially; they couldn't help offering thumbnail diagnoses any more
than they could help having thumbnails.
"No use," I said, deciding it was safe to drop into my chair. "Who can
adjust me to an environment to which I'm fundamentally unsuited?"
"Maybe there is something physically wrong with him, Amy," my father
suggested hopefully. "Maybe you should make an appointment for him at
the cure-all?"
Mother shook her neatly coiffed head. "He's been to it dozens of times
and he always checks out in splendid shape. None of us can spare the
time to go with him again, just on an off-chance, and he could hardly
be allowed to make such a long trip all by himself. Pity there isn't a
machine in every community, but, then, we don't really need them."
* * * * *
Now that the virus diseases had been licked, people hardly ever
got sick any more and, when they did, it was mostly psychosomatic.
Life was so well organized that there weren't even many accidents
these days. It was a safe, orderly existence for those who fitted
into it--which accounted for more than ninety-five per cent of the
population. The only ones who didn't adjust were those who couldn't,
like me--psi-deficients, throwbacks to an earlier era. There were no
physical cripples, because anybody could have a new arm or a new leg
grafted on, but you couldn't graft psi powers onto an atavism or, if
you could, the technique hadn't been developed yet.
"I feel a sense of impending doom brooding over this household," my
youngest brother remarked cheerfully as he vaulted into his chair.
"You always do, Timothy," my mother said, unfolding her napkin. "And I
must say it's not in good taste, especially at breakfast."
He reached for his juice. "Guess this is a doomed household. And what
was all that emotional uproar about?"
"The usual," Sylvia said from the doorway before anyone else could
answer. She slid warily into her chair. "Hey, Dan, I'm here!" she
called. "If anything else comes in, it comes in manually, understand?"
"Oh, all right." Dan emerged from the kitchen with a tray of food
floating ahead of him.
"The usual? Trouble with Kev?" Tim looked at me narrowly. "Somehow my
sense of ominousness is connected with him."
"Well, that's perfectly natural--" Sylvia began, then stopped as Mother
caught her eye.
"I didn't mean that," Tim said. "I still say Kev's got something we
can't figure out."
"You've been saying that for years," Danny protested, "and he's been
tested for every faculty under the Sun. He can't telepath or teleport
or telekinesthesize or even teletype. He can't precognize or prefix or
prepossess. He can't--"
"Strictly a bundle of no-talent, that's me," I interrupted, trying to
keep my animal feelings from getting the better of me. That was how my
family thought of me, I knew--as an animal, and not a very lovable one,
either.
"No," Tim said, "he's just got something we haven't developed a test
for. It'll come out some day, you'll see." He smiled at me.
* * * * *
I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who
really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim.
I know you're trying to be kind, but--"
"He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it.
Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim
scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his
extracurricular prognostications too far."
Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes.
After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he
wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather
Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.
Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage
me. As Danny had said, she _knew_ but she didn't really _understand_.
Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.
* * * * *
Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their
various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared--he was
a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the
continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take
the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a
psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist.
Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a
promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on
pianos.
Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there
were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents
would have none of them--partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of
their own community standing.
"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always
said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take
care of the house."
And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a
techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough,
those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke
down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement
robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a
constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of
a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine
could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of
my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway,
they would just do it all over again when they got home.
So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to
take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and
couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was
telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even
if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got
nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can
get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a
hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound
tapes, but they also bored me after a while.
I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting,
which would classify me as a telesensitive--artistic ability being
considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power--but I couldn't
even do anything like that.
About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were
out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't
want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me
and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they
were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest
Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective."
I didn't have a girl, either. Although some of them were sort of
attracted to me--I could see that--they could hardly go out with me
without exposing themselves to ridicule. In their sandals, I would have
done the same thing, but that didn't stop me from hating them.
* * * * *
I wished I had been born a couple of hundred years ago--before people
started playing around with nuclear energy and filling the air with
radiations that they were afraid would turn human beings into hideous
monsters. Instead, they developed the psi powers that had always been
latent in the species until we developed into a race of supermen. I
don't know why I say _we_--in 1960 or so, I might have been considered
superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.
Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything
useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found
a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers
geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the
time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just
barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres
drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive
had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the
stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.
I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people
couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running
around--not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior
wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent
in me. Tim must be right, I thought--I must have some undreamed-of
power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was
that power?
For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be,
explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none
productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself.
As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably
nothing more than what I seemed to be--a simple psi-negative. Yet, from
time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my
knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent
psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?
I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people
liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature.
Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at
home in those woodland--or, rather, pseudo-woodland--surroundings,
able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could
with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more
sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any
household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody
noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness
as well as extrasensory imbecility.
However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns
than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they
broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings
than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.
* * * * *
On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I
got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me.
They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me
so calm.
"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate
concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.
"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim
shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened."
"Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap.
"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly.
"There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!"
This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my
enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep
their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them.
"What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?"
"Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship
says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and
left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a
pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial
ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going."
"But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war."
"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace,
but we'll have to prepare for war just in case."
There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but
we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military
techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back
with reinforcements--if such were its intention--in less than six
months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though
we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the
aliens' armament.
They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would
be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits
of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths
to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the
outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the
first place.
Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I
had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in
which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival
to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more
talented race.
* * * * *
"It isn't so much our defense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as
lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties
and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them.
It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll
be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of
absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid
techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little
surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even
better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's
pain."