Second Sight | Page 4

the answer, not me, nor Aarons, nor anybody. And Aarons wants to use you to find out."
I nodded slowly. "I see. So I'm to be used as a sort of refined electrical stimulator," I said. "Well, I guess you know what you can tell Aarons."
He was silent, and I couldn't read him. Then he looked up. "Amy, I'm not sure we can tell him that."
I stared at him. "You mean you think he could force me?"
"He says you're a public charge, that as long as you have to be supported and cared for, they have the right to use your faculties. He's right on the first point. You are a public charge. You have to be sheltered and protected. If you wandered so much as a mile outside these walls you'd never survive, and you know it."
I sat stunned. "But Dr. Custer--"
"Dr. Custer is trying to help. But he hasn't succeeded so far. If he can, then it will be a different story. But I can't stall much longer, Amy. Aarons has a powerful argument. You're psi-high. You're the first full-fledged, wide-open, free-wheeling psi-high that's ever appeared in human history. The first. Others in the past have shown potential, maybe, but nothing they could ever learn to control. You've got control, you're fully developed. You're here, and you're the only one there is."
"So I happened to be unlucky," I snapped. "My genes got mixed up."
"That's not true, and you know it," Lambertson said. "We know your chromosomes better than your face. They're the same as anyone else's. There's no gene difference, none at all. When you're gone, you'll be gone, and there's no reason to think that your children will have any more psi potential than Charlie Dakin has."
Something was building up in me then that I couldn't control any longer. "You think I should go along with Aarons," I said dully.
He hesitated. "I'm afraid you're going to have to, sooner or later. Aarons has some latents up in Boston. He's certain that they're latents. He's talked to the directors down here. He's convinced them that you could work with his people, draw them out. You could open the door to a whole new world for human beings."
I lost my temper then. It wasn't just Aarons, or Lambertson, or Dakin, or any of the others. It was all of them, dozens of them, compounded year upon year upon year. "Now listen to me for a minute," I said. "Have any of you ever considered what I wanted in this thing? Ever? Have any of you given that one single thought, just once, one time when you were so sick of thinking great thoughts for humanity that you let another thought leak through? Have you ever thought about what kind of a shuffle I've had since all this started? Well, you'd better think about it. Right now."
"Amy, you know I don't want to push you."
"Listen to me, Lambertson. My folks got rid of me fast when they found out about me. Did you know that? They hated me because I scared them! It didn't hurt me too much, because I thought I knew why they hated me, I could understand it, and I went off to Bairdsley without even crying. They were going to come see me every week, but do you know how often they managed to make it? Not once after I was off their hands. And then at Bairdsley Aarons examined me and decided that I was a cripple. He didn't know anything about me then, but he thought psi was a defect. And that was as far as it went. I did what Aarons wanted me to do at Bairdsley. Never what I wanted, just what they wanted, years and years of what they wanted. And then you came along, and I came to the Study Center and did what you wanted."
It hurt him, and I knew it. I guess that was what I wanted, to hurt him and to hurt everybody. He was shaking his head, staring at me. "Amy, be fair. I've tried, you know how hard I've tried."
"Tried what? To train me? Yes, but why? To give me better use of my psi faculties? Yes, but why? Did you do it for me? Is that really why you did it? Or was that just another phoney front, like all the rest of them, in order to use me, to make me a little more valuable to have around?"
He slapped my face so hard it jolted me. I could feel the awful pain and hurt in his mind as he stared at me, and I sensed the stinging in his palm that matched the burning in my cheek. And then something fell away in his mind, and I saw something I had never seen before.
He