“You ever going to marry, or have kids?” Johnny asked at his most casual.
“Johnny Greene, what are you leading up to?” She cocked an eyebrow, which warned him that, if he was not straight with her, she would probably winkle the information out of his mind.
Johnny gave her a rakish grin. “Nothing—except that Dave Lehardt just arrived.” His grin broadened as he saw her reaction. “Ah! So! You’re not entirely immune to his charm, after all.”
Rhyssa managed a laugh, though she could not hide the sudden flush of pleasure at the news. “How do you know? You can’t ‘hear’ him if I can’t.”
“I saw him get out of the car. He’s coming around through the house.” The gleam in Johnny’s eyes was intolerable to her.
“We’re just working friends,” she said, and heard a mental ha-ha from Johnny as Dave Lehardt strode into the pool room. Johnny chuckled again as Dave’s glance rested on her just that moment longer before he greeted the others.
“Hi there, Skeleteam,” Dave called to Peter, who had an arm looped around the pool stair rail. “Need a handout?”
“I think you’d better, Pete,” Rhyssa said. “Your lips are blue, and your skin’s wrinkled. Hi, Dave.”
Johnny, on a tight band: You’d make a good team, you know. His beauty and your intelligence!
Rhyssa projected an image of herself chasing Johnny with an outsized hunk of wood with the words “blunt instrument” carved on it.
Johnny: Dorotea thinks so, too.
Rhyssa: You guys let me do my own thinking.
Johnny: Dave will, because he can’t hear you. And that’s about the only drawback. He lusts after you, you know.
“Really impressive launch today, Pete,” Dave went on, hauling the boy out of the pool by one arm and deftly covering him with a huge towel.
“He gets better every time,” Johnny said, latching onto a spare lounger with his artificial foot and hauling it closer to where he and Rhyssa were sitting.
Rhyssa: You watch yourself, John Greene. I’ve my own minder, she recalled with amusement Peter’s handy treatment of the annoying Prince Phanibal, and I’ll tell him to dunk you if you misbehave.
Johnny sent her an image of wide-eyed innocence. Me? Step out of line—especially if you threaten to short-circuit my cybernetic limbs in a lousy pool? D’you know what salt water does to my spare parts? He imaged a violent shudder that sent bits and pieces spinning off his artificial arm and leg.
“Actually, the last three shoots have been within a jog of the same power settings,” Rhyssa said to the new arrival.
Dave Lehardt periscoped his lean length to seat himself on a lounger and grinned at Rhyssa. Was she imagining that his eyes were warmer when he looked at her? Damn him for not having a Talent! Damn him for having such a naturally dense mental shield! She had no real clue—except in blue eyes she wanted to drown in—to go on. No wonder the unTalented regularly bungled relationships. And yet . . .
“NASA is delighted with the effectiveness of its new guidance-and-tracking system,” Dave was saying, looking well pleased, “and they’re quite happy to leave it in the ‘need to know’ category. More queries from Padrugoi, requesting details of this top-secret G and T as a possible adjunct to their systems.”
“And?” Johnny queried, flipping over on the sunbed, eyes narrowed to slits and his body relaxing in the warmth.
“General Halloway hems and haws with the best of them about a trial model, with a formidable test schedule ahead of it, by no means a totally proven system . . .”
“I am too a proven system,” Peter said, looking disgruntled as he floated over, an eerie-looking maneuver since his feet were invisible under the swathing of towel that he was trying to keep out of the puddles around the pool. His teeth chattered.
“Oh here,” Rhyssa said, making room for him on the sunbed. She would have fallen off if Dave had not quickly prevented it with hands and knees. She felt warm where he touched her, a warmth that was nothing generated by a sunbed. Then she settled Peter beside her, adjusting his limbs. “You’re up to fifteen minutes’ sunning today, aren’t you?”
“Tell you one thing,” Dave went on, still supporting Rhyssa’s body. “I’m going to have to change the nickname Skeleteam. You don’t look so much like one anymore.”
“All this good wholesome Florida sunshine,” Peter said, grinning at Dave. He had finally gotten over his jealousy of the PR man: it was difficult to be jealous of a guy he liked so much, who could think up neat treats and found the best places to eat. Johnny often argued to Rhyssa—when Dave was not around—that the man had to have Talent but that it simply wasn’t measurable. Then he discussed things like traumatic breakthroughs and psychological reluctances, and Rhyssa replied that sometimes it was nice to know someone who could always surprise you.
“If you see any of that wholesome sunshine, let me know, huh?” Dave remarked, referring to the fact that the rain had lifted only briefly in the past three weeks. “When are you guys going to develop a reliable Weather Talent?”
“Look, we just got one minor miracle up and running,” Rhyssa replied. “Give us at least three days!”
“God only rested one day,” Dave said, deepening his voice to a bass register and looking pious.
“Three weeks, three months, three years, three decades,” Johnny replied in a sepulchral tone. “Can’t even figure ol’ Petey boy out, and I’ve been busting my buns for weeks now.”
“Pete,” Dave began, “how do you see what you do? Might as well ask the source right out straight,” he added in a broad aside to Rhyssa.
Peter laughed and pretended to consider the question, knotting his brows and rubbing his chin the way Johnny sometimes did. “It’s like I think that’s what I want to do—move the shuttle up—and I sort of lean into the generators, revving them up, and then I sort of”—he shrugged his thin shoulders—“let go.”
“Like a stone from a slingshot?” Dave asked.
“Yeah, sort of like that.”
“You don’t sound sure.”
“I’m not. It needs doing. I do it.”
Rhyssa, sensing Peter’s distress about being unable to explain adequately, put a warning hand on Dave’s knee. His hand immediately covered hers, keeping her arm in a slightly awkward position. Over Peter’s prone body, Johnny grinned at her.
“There are many operations,” Rhyssa went on quickly, “that one accomplishes strictly on an involuntary basis. Like breathing. You don’t consciously go through the steps of drawing breath in and exhaling it—it’s an involuntary procedure. Or take reaching for a glass. You don’t consciously tell your hand to extend the required distance, tell your fingers to encircle it and your arm to lift the light weight. The task is accomplished without much conscious effort. Peter is working on such a deeply involuntary basis that he cannot—yet—analyze the requisite steps. Once Lance Baden is released from durance vile on the station, I think we’ll see progress in understanding what Skeleteam does as easily as he breathes.”
“It’s not quite that easy,” Peter said.
“Don’t hurt Skeleteam’s feelings,” Johnny said in mock affront. “He’ll strike!”
“Not with his contract, he won’t,” Rhyssa said feelingly.
“You know, Pete,” Johnny began in a thoughtful tone, “what you said about something needing to be done and doing it. You really don’t stop to think how? You just do it?”
“As you yourself, if I may remind you, landed a badly damaged shuttle on your twenty-first mission,” Dave put in. “Experts still haven’t figured out how you did that!”
John Greene grinned at him. “Neither have I. Sorry, Pete.”
“You were using kinesis?” Peter asked.
“Nothing else would have gotten us down that day with one wing crumpled and the tail assembly blown off. Technically I had what they call a traumatic explosion of Talent necessitated by an intense urge to survive.”
“What hit you?” Peter asked then. He had always w
anted to ask, but it had never been quite the right moment and he was not sure if the colonel liked to be reminded of how he had lost an arm and a leg.
“Some damned-fool half-trained clowns, doing aerobatics through the flight path,” Johnny told him, cursing fluently and inventively on both audible and telepathic levels. Peter’s eyes rounded with awe at the flavorful language. “Fortunately they didn’t survive to answer to me, or the law, for their antics.”
“Oh!” was Peter’s reaction to John’s uncharacteristic bitterness.
“You’re not going to waste the pool, are you, Dave?” Rhyssa asked, to change the subject, and in the hope of regaining control of her hand before her arm fell asleep.
“You’re stuck with me for a few days at any rate,” Dave replied. “Without benefit of the Skeleteam, the airport’s socked in solid.” He rose and, whistling a jaunty tune, began to pick his way through the puddles in the direction of the changing room.
Johnny heaved a sigh and resettled himself on the sunbed, hands cushioning his head. The nu-skin sheathing his artificial arm looked real enough except, Rhyssa noticed, that it did not take a tan. Peter, however, was becoming a rich brown that made him appear like any other healthy, if scrawny, boy his age. He was also falling asleep, considerably more tired by the morning’s activities than he would ever admit. Smiling tenderly down at the boy, Rhyssa eased herself off the sunbed and onto the lounger that Dave had just vacated. She checked the timer: Peter had ten minutes to go. She relaxed on the soft mattress.
“Je-sus Christ!”
Dave’s sudden expletive roused her, and she watched helplessly as, in midair, he flailed with arms and legs from a slip in a puddle, his long body poised to come down right across the corner of the tiled pool in what would be a serious fall. The sunbed lights went off, and the next instant his abrupt descent was halted and he came to rest gently on the poolside, unharmed, unbruised, but considerably shaken.
“How the hell . . .”
“My God!” Johnny Greene exclaimed. “Did you do that, Pete?” he asked. The very slightest of snores answered him. “My God! I did it! I did it! I did it!” His voice rose in a crescendo as he stared at Rhyssa in a state of shocked delight and surprise.
Rhyssa began to shake her head, grinning so hard at the breakthrough that she thought her face would split.
“That was all you,” she assured him. “Once again Johnny on the spot!”
The moment Dave Lehardt entered the kitchen that evening as Rhyssa was clearing up the debris of their celebratory meal, she knew “a moment” had come. Over the last few months of their close association, she had learned to pick up the subtle hints of his body language and her own responses to him. She felt her heartbeat begin to speed up, and she tried not to crash dishes about or drop things. Worse, she could extract no helpful clues from this man’s mind. Perhaps that was why Dave appeared to be so much more romantic than any of her Talented associations.
He came right up to her so that she had to look about, to acknowledge his proximity.
“The hardest thing in dealing with you Talents is to catch you when no one else is listening,” he began. His blue eyes held a very intense look. He took the saucepan away from her and returned it to the soapy water, then put both hands on her arms and turned her slightly but decisively toward him. “Pete and Johnny are so involved in a rehash of my pratfall, they couldn’t be paying attention to anything else.” With a little pressure of his hands, he pulled her against him.
Johnny: Don’t you dare be coy!
Rhyssa: Get out of my head, Johnny Greene.
Peter: Ah, just when it’s getting interesting. How’ll I ever learn how it’s done!
Rhyssa: Break off! Both of you! If I feel so much as a tendril of thought . . .
Johnny: I think she means it!
Peter: I know she does!
Her mind was filled with a deafening silence.
“They’re not,” Rhyssa assured him.
“I’ve been told and warned, obliquely and right to my face, that I’ve no right to ask a woman of your obvious Talent, and talents, to marry a man without an ounce of the right stuff in him.”
Rhyssa felt a surge of anger flare deep inside. She wondered who had been inhibiting this wonderful, caring man—especially considering all he had done to aid Talents. Then she willed him not to stop talking such marvelously romantic stuff and tilted her head up encouragingly. She shivered with anticipation.
“But I think such a decision is up to you and me,” he went on. “And I’m so totally besotted with you that I can’t think straight when you’re in the same room with me, and I don’t think of much else but you when we’re apart. Rhyssa Owen, would you even consider marrying me?”
“What took you so many eons to ask?” she replied, folding her arms about his neck and grinning up at him. With a gladness that seemed to emanate from every pore of him, he clasped her firmly in his arms and kissed her with a great deal of entirely satisfactory expertise, just as if he had read her mind.
CHAPTER 15
Sascha!
He could not ignore Dorotea’s call, but it was coming at an awkward moment. He lifted his hand to signal to Budworth and Sirikit for a slight break in their discussion.
Dorotea’s mental tone was colored by vexation. As you showed her how to use her wristband to purchase damned near anything anywhere, you may now teach her thrift and budgeting. And some sense of order in her own room! There’s not an inch of space that isn’t stacked ceiling-high with “bargains.”
Sascha: Where is she?
Dorotea, at the end of her patience: Trying on clothes while viewing today’s lessons!
“Look, Bud, run those ethnic groupings again,” Sascha ordered. “We’ve at least got a statistical forecast of how many psionic Talents each generation has produced since Darrow and op Owen’s time. Now let’s break it down into individual Talent manifestations: precogs, finders, affinities, kinetics, telepaths, telempaths.”
Budworth shrugged equably and began to formulate the program.
“I still don’t know how,” Sirikit said in her soft, lilting tones, “that’s going to help us discover Talent in the Linears.”
“Where there’s smoke, there’s gotta be a fire or two,” Sascha commented cryptically as he exited. But his mind was already on one particular Talent who had come so far from her early years in the Linears.
Since that fateful shopping trip three weeks before, Tirla had discovered a new pastime that almost rivaled her hunger for learning. At first, Dorotea had been amused. “It’s hunger of another sort: acquisition. It’ll pass.”
Cass had accompanied her on two more expeditions, showing her how to use the subway transport, and thought it was fun to watch Tirla slip into the most exclusive shops and boutiques. Then she had started shopping on her own, and scoffed when Dorotea worried that child-stealers would snatch her.
“Snatch me? Not likely,” Tirla replied scathingly. “I can smell their sort coming on the streets. I’m safe in the malls.”
But the malls were not free from all peril, for she was detained twice by overzealous officials and, to her credit, had waited patiently until someone—usually Sascha—arrived from the Center to verify her right to wear the ID bracelet and make charges against the Center’s account.
She was more amused by the detentions than alarmed, and determined to enjoy her new pastime. Certainly she was not deterred from her expeditions, and since Sascha backed Cass’s opinion that Tirla was capable of handling herself, Dorotea’s apprehension waned. Invariably, Tirla ended her afternoons at the Old-Fashioned Parlor. When Tirla announced that she was going to work her way right through the five pages of confectionery selections, Dorotea had laughed.
“It might put a little weight on those bird bones of hers, and she always eats her dinner,” she said. “I wish she would put on weight. What must those shop attendants think when that child looks half-starved all the time?”
Dorotea was standing in the living
room when Sascha arrived in answer to her summons, and she pointed sternly toward Tirla’s room. Sascha tapped on the door, and Tirla’s cheerful hum broke off.
“Who is it?” There was always that note of apprehension when the girl was caught unawares. Once she could break into the telepathic mode that Sascha was certain she possessed, she would rarely be caught off-guard again.
“Sascha!”
“Just a minute.”
For just a moment, Sascha thought he caught a stray coy thought, and then the door opened, in stages, because Tirla had to rearrange things to get it wide enough for him to enter. Sascha looked in and groaned.
“Tirla, what happened to the kid who had to be coaxed into buying more than one outfit?” It was the first thing that came into his head, and it was probably not at all the way to handle the situation.
Dorotea, in disgust: Ham-handed twit!
Tirla blinked at Sascha. “But you told me I could shop whenever I wanted to. Just look what I found today!” And she held up a pair of stiletto-heeled sandals with jeweled straps. “And they fit. They didn’t cost much, because the shopkeeper had had them around for decades and practically gave them to me. Aren’t they lovely? D’you want to see them on? They make me much taller.”
“I’m sure they do, Tirla, but to be candid, they’re not the sort of thing a girl your age should wear.”
“They fit!” she repeated as if that were the most important aspect.
“Tirla! Is there no place I can sit down in here? And that’s what has Dorotea so upset. You know how neat she keeps everything in the house.”
Dorotea: That’s right. Blame me.
“While Talents may have what they need, and also what they want, within reason,” he went on, “that’s the operative phrase. This—” He gestured broadly, hooking a hanger and its layers of clothing off the door. The pile tumbled to enlarge a mass of colorful blouses lying beside the door. “This is no longer reasonable!”
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