"I'll tell you that when you're on my payroll."
"It's a trick," Alcorn said angrily. "I searched for years before I
settled down with Consolidated and I didn't find a trace of anybody like
myself. I don't believe there are any."
"Most of them covered themselves better." Jaffers added, with cold
finality, "I don't haggle, Alcorn. You'll work for me or for no one."
* * * * *
"The trouble is," Alcorn said, "that I'm different from other people and
I have to know why. I know _how_ I'm different, but if I knew _why_, I'd
never have come to a psychiatrist."
Dr. Hagen rattled the data sheet in his hands and blinked behind his
pince-nez like a friendly beagle. He was a very puzzled man, being
accustomed to analyzing his own reactions as well as those of his
patients. Alcorn could see him struggling to account for the sudden
serenity that had come over him the instant Alcorn entered the
office--certainly it was not the doctor's usual frame of mind, from the
first sour look of him--and failing.
"Different in what way, Mr. Alcorn?"
"I soothe people," Alcorn said. "There's something about me that
inspires trust and an eagerness to please. Everyone roughly within a
radius of fifty feet--I've checked the limit a thousand
times--immediately feels a sort of euphoria. They're as happy as so many
children at a picnic and they can't do enough for me or for each other."
Dr. Hagen blinked, but not with disbelief.
"It affects psychiatrists, too," Alcorn went on. "You'd cheerfully waive
the fee for this consultation if I asked it, or lend me fifty credits if
I were strapped. The point is that people are never difficult when I'm
around, because I was born with the unlikely gift of making them happy.
That gift is the most valuable asset I own, but I've never understood
it--and as long as I don't understand it, there's the chance that it may
be a mixed blessing. I think it's backfired on me already in one fashion
and possibly in another."
He shook out a cigarette and the psychiatrist obligingly held a lighter
to it. Dr. Hagen, Alcorn thought, must normally have been an
exceptionally strong-willed man, for he hesitated noticeably before he
spun the wheel.
[Illustration]
"Actually," Alcorn said, "I've begun to worry about my sanity and I'm
afraid my gift is responsible. For the past week, I've had a recurrent
hallucination, a sort of waking nightmare that comes just when I least
expect it and leaves me completely unstrung. It's worse than
recurrent--it's progressive, and each new seizure leaves me a little
closer to something that I'm desperately afraid to face."
The psychiatrist made a judicious tent of his fingers. "Obviously you
are an intelligent and conscientious man, Mr. Alcorn, else you would not
have contented yourself with your comparatively minor job. But your
profession as claims adjustor must impose a considerable strain upon
your nervous organization. Add to this that you are a bachelor at the
age of thirty-three and the natural conclusion--"
In spite of his mood, Alcorn laughed. "Wrong tack--remember my gift!
Besides, I'm engaged to be married next month and I'm quite happy with
the prospect. This trouble of mine is something entirely different. It's
tied in somehow with my talent for soothing and it scares me."
He could have added that Jaffers' hardly veiled threat on his life
disturbed him as well, but saw no point in wasting time on the one
danger he understood perfectly.
"This vision," Alcorn said, "and the sensory sharpness and conviction of
disaster that come with it--it's no ordinary hallucination. It's as real
as my peculiar talent and represents a very real danger. It's working
some sort of change in me that I don't like and I've got to find out
what that change is or I'm done for. I _feel_ that."