We rarely operated as a team anymore, and Sammy had called us in from independent assignments: me from Louisiana, Vince from his translation post at the U.N., and Snake from an interrogation in Seattle. Martha had not had to travel at all; she was on temporary assignment at the Center, teaching. We all took a turn at that once every year, working with the kids whose powers were the same as ours, but who still had to learn how to handle them. The Center had a staff of teachers for the normal curriculum, but it took a sensitive to teach another one how to live with the responsibility that went with the talent. I had always found it to be a rewarding experience, but Martha had caught a rough one with Little, and he was driving her up the wall.
"He's anything but little," she said to Vince. "He's only sixteen and he's almost as big as you are. And nobody calls him Amos anymore. Chicken Little, that's his name now."
"I like it, but why Chicken?"
"That's his favorite game. You know, going head-to-head with cars, first one to turn away is chicken. Well, Amos never turns. Never."
"Here in the Center? Where do they get the cars?"
Snake laughed. "Where did we get them when we were here?" She had a right to laugh. When we were kids, nobody was quicker or better than Snake at lifting a jeep from the motor pool.
"The other day he talked another kid into doing it with forklift trucks. Can you imagine two forklifts going head-to-head? It was like a pair of saber-toothed tigers."
More laughter.
"You can laugh," said Martha, her voice troubled, "but I'm really worried about the boy. I'm beginning to think he's not right in the head."
The laughter reached a new level. "Did I hear you right?" I asked. "Not right in the head? Do you remember what you were like when you came here? Do you remember what we all were like?"
The laughter stopped in sympathy for Martha. There was nothing she could say in answer to those questions, although she knew the answers well enough. Before coming to the Center, we all had been quite mad.
The Center had found Martha in a home for retarded children in Omaha. She had been there for a year. She heard voices in her head that no one else could hear. When she heard the voices she went wild. She screamed for hours, she clawed her body, she soiled herself. When the Center found her she was under constant restraint and sedation. She was twelve years old.
The Center had found Vince tucked away in the corner of a drug-abuse program in Boston. Vince also heard the voices. His parents had abandoned him when he was seven, and after that he had lived in the streets. He had learned from his elders how to boost drunks and how to shoot smack. The smack kept the voices quiet. He was kicking when the Center found him, and the voices were back, filling his head with their howls. He was twelve years old.
The Center found Claudia in a religious commune in Idaho. The members of the group worshipped snakes. They also worshipped Claudia. When Claudia heard the voices she went into a trance and made hissing noises. That, to members of the commune, made her part of the godhead, a higher form of snake. They kept her in a cage and fed her what the snakes ate. When the Center found her she had not spoken a word for months, and she moved by slithering across the floor on her belly. She was twelve years old.
The Center found Sammy in an expensive sanitarium north of New York City. His parents had placed him there. He was catatonic, incapable of voluntary movement. He could not speak, and his limbs remained fixed in whatever position they were placed. His eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking. He had been that way since he first heard the voices. He was twelve years old.
The Center found me locked in the back bedroom of a shack in Freeman, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma line. The room had a bed, a chair, and a slop bucket. I was chained to the bed, and I was naked. My body was covered with old scars and fresh welts. The man I called my daddy said that the voices I heard were the tongues of the devil. He was a shade-tree mechanic and a part-time preacher, and he knew about devils. At the end of each day he whipped the devil out of me with a razor strop, and then prayed for my deliverance. When the Center found me I could not stand or sit, and my body was a festering wound. I was twelve years old.
That's what we had been, my generation at the Center, and other generations, before us and after, had come from the same sort of background: the abused, the imprisoned, the seemingly mad. At the Center we were cleansed, we were nourished, we were treated, we were loved, and we were taught how to live with the voices in our heads. They were the voices of the world around us. The lust of the satyr, the sloth of the slob, the greed of the avaricious, the jealousy of the discontented, the righteousness of the fanatic, the despair of the helpless, the flaring orange delight of the arsonist, and the screaming crimson of the psychopath-those were the voices that had howled around within our heads like winds in a cavern, and had blown us away into another world. It took time to learn how to live with those voices, and by the time we were sixteen most of us had managed it. Amos Little was one of the exceptions.
"I hate to say this," said Martha, and we all knew what was coming.
"Go ahead, spit it out," said Vince.
"He may be a deuce."
Nobody laughed at that. There was nothing funny about one of the kids turning out to be a deuce, a failed ace. It didn't happen very often, but it happened. A kid would come into the program with all the potential ability of a true sensitive, but the ability would never develop. A kid like that was left in limbo, neither a normal nor a sensitive, capable of limited communication, but useless in the field. There was nothing to do with a kid like that; he was in the system, and couldn't get out, but he could never truly be a part of it. He was a deuce, and around the Center the deuces were the hewers of wood and the haulers of water. I had known a few happy deuces, but I hadn't known many.
Snake asked, "What makes you think so?"
Martha shrugged. "The usual. He has a great deal of difficulty communicating head to head. He can do it, but not easily, and not all of the time."
"Any pain?"
"He says that it hurts his head when he tries to do it."
It was the classic sign of the failed ace, and it brought more silence. Sammy looked up from what he was doing, and said, "That doesn't have to mean that he's a deuce. I've known kids with the same problem, and they've broken through."
"So have I," said Martha, "but…" She waved the thought away. "I hope you're right."
The telephone rang. Sammy picked it up, said a few words, put it down, and announced, "Our visitors are here."
3
THE Prisoner dreamed every night, and every night the dream was the same. He dreamed of a young girl, ten or eleven years old, whose face was smooth and oval, whose eyes were dark and deep, and whose hair was a wave of chestnut that a loving mother had drawn into braids. That was what The Prisoner saw at the start of each dream, but at the end of it the oval face was shattered, the eyes were sightless, and the little girl's hair was matted with blood and bits of brain.
In his dream, The Prisoner knew that it would not have happened if the child had not screamed. It would not have happened if the mother had been able to control her. In an airplane operation the silence and obedience of the hostages are essential to the success of the mission. It has to be that way, but the little girl had screamed, had gone on screaming, and so Amir had hit her on top of the head with his pistol. Even then, she had not stopped, and Amir had had to hit her several times before she was silent. That was the way that The Prisoner remembered it, although sometimes his memory played tricks on him, and in recollection it seemed that it had been Murad, not Amir, who had beaten the child. Amir or Murad, one or the other. Both of them were dead now, hunted down by the Zionist murder squads. Of the four on the mission, only Zahra and The Prisoner were still alive, she undercover in Paris, and he in the camp that he thought of as a prison.