"You don't really believe that," Forester said evenly. "You're just proposing a two-stage termination."
"Forester—" Kincaid began, but was interrupted by the sound of heavy footsteps at the door.
"Here I am," Dr. Barenburg announced, weaving just slightly as he gripped the doorjamb.
"Oh, hell," Kincaid muttered. "Drunk again."
Forester looked away in obscure embarrassment as Barenburg clumped in... and was thus the only one who saw the spasm of emotion flicker across Twenty-Seven's deformed face.
—
TERROR!
I jerk back, sliding my touch back along the movement/flow as quickly as possible. I somehow know that I could withdraw faster if I let go, but I am too afraid to do so. But finally I am back.
For a long time I am too frightened even to try and think. I long to curl myself up, but I cannot do so with the pressures on me. My work remains untouched, but I do not care.
Gradually, the terror lessens, leaving me strangely weak but able to try and understand what happened. I remember that I found one end of the movement/flow, a box inside which the movement/flow merged with a bewildering group of others. I continued on, and entered a large empty space. It frightened me at first—so much emptiness!—but without knowing why I moved on, seeking for something to touch.
And then I touched it.
Even now I cannot begin to understand what that was. I had been unable to follow my movement/flow through the box I found; this was many, many times worse. Most frightening of all was that I could feel... something... familiar about it.
No more, I decide. I will stay here and do the work I was meant to do. I begin again to encourage the movement/flow in the cold boxes, waiting eagerly for the deep satisfaction to come.
But another surprise—it does not. Not the way it once did. Once more something has changed.
There is no fear with this change, for I think I understand. I have seen many new things since becoming aware, and I wish to understand all of them. But I do not, and the satisfaction of my work is no longer enough. Is this what being aware means, never to be satisfied? If so, I do not think I want to remain like this.
But perhaps I have no choice. Even as I try to do my work, I also find myself reaching along the movement/flow again. I will be careful, for I am still afraid... but the urge to discover is as strong as the urge to work. This is something I must do.
—
"There it is again—first up, then down," Kincaid said, his gaze on the radiation detectors. "I'd be a lot happier if he'd just quit altogether."
"It would certainly make things easier on us," Dr. Barenburg said dryly as he hunched over the control panel, his nose six inches from the bio data display. He seemed to have sobered up somewhat in the last few minutes, Forester thought. But then, maybe it was just harder to stagger sitting down.
Barenburg leaned back in the chair, shaking his head. "Can't see what it might be. His nutrient mixture's fine and his oxygen content's at the prescribed level. Metabolism is up a bit, but within the normal range. Most importantly, I guess, is that nothing here shows the same fluctuation that we're getting in his telekinetic functions."
"You think he could be losing it entirely?" Kincaid asked, looking worried.
Barenburg shrugged. "I can't tell without further tests." He turned to Forester. "Ted, you said you saw his eyes open at one point. Did they seem to be focused on anything?"
It was Forester's turn to shrug. "I don't know. With the slant and epicanthic folds it's awfully hard to tell."
"Did they move around at all, or just look straight ahead?"
"Moved; I specifically remember him looking left at one point."
"Hmm." Barenburg looked thoughtful... and a little apprehensive.
Kincaid noticed it. "What do you think it means?"
"Well... it sounds very much like he's being distracted from his job."
"That's impossible," Kincaid said, a hair too quickly. "The Spoonbenders couldn't muster an IQ of 10 among them. What could possibly hold their attention when their every instinct is to yank neutrons out of radioactive nuclei?"
"The coded RNA is not as strong as an instinct," Barenburg pointed out. "And as for distractions, who knows? It's not like Spoonbender Twenty-Seven is completely confined to Cubicle Twenty-Seven. With telekinetic touch-and-grab he can reach into the next cubicle or examine the conveyer that moves the nuclear waste around. True, he's not strong enough to actually do much, but who knows how far his sense can reach?"
Kincaid glanced sideways at Forester. "Even if I grant you all that, there's still the low IQ and the lower attention span."
"Maybe his IQ's been improved," Forester suggested.
This time they both looked at him. "How?" Kincaid asked.
"A lot of highly radioactive material has passed over him the last eighteen months," Forester said. "I know there's a lead wall between it and the Spoonbenders, but isn't it possible the radiation that got through altered his brain somehow?"
"And made him smarter?" Kincaid shook his head. "No way."
Forester bristled. "Why not?"
"Do you fix a watch by hitting it with a hammer?" Barenburg interjected.
"No, but—"
"Look, Ted, what do you know about Spoonbender physiology?" the doctor asked. "Anything?"
Forester shrugged. "They were test tube grown from sperm samples taken right after Red Staley won the Smithsonian Triple-P." Soon afterwards, anyway; for a man scornfully labeled a pretentious "spoonbender" to actually win the Provable Psychic Phenomena prize was comparable to Jesse Owens's performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the press had had a field day with the story. No one else had been able to get near Staley for days. "You enhanced Staley's natural TK by doubling the proper chromosome, giving them all the trisomy problems they've got now—"
"Actually, we were aware of the dangers involved with an extra autosome," Barenburg interrupted, sounding more than a little defensive. "We tried to remove the corresponding autosome from the egg cells before fertilization. But the technique somehow generated instabilities; there were breakages and translocations...." He shook his head as if to clear it. "But that's genetics, not physiology. Do you know anything about their brain chemistry problems?"
"No. I assumed the retardation was due to simple brain damage."
Barenburg shook his head. Something passed over his face, too quickly for Forester to identify. "Our best guess is that there's no real major cellular damage anywhere. The problem is lack of internal communication between the various sections of the brain due to inhibition of the chemicals that act as neurotransmitters at the neural synapses."
Forester frowned. "Then how can they use TK?"
"Apparently that function's fairly localized, and messages within that area get through okay. But for something like intelligence... well, when the abstract thought center is in the parietal lobe, the organizational center for that thought is up in the frontal lobe, and—oh, hell; you get the picture."
"Yeah," Forester said, a sour taste in his mouth.
"Let's get back to the problem at hand, shall we?" Kincaid cut in. "One of our Spoonbenders may be losing his touch—and if so, we've got to find out why, pronto. Doctor, there aren't any tests your people will want to do before we pull him off the line, are there?"
Barenburg sighed. "Probably not. You want us to start right away?"
"Wait a second," Forester said. He'd been counting on Barenburg to be a little less gung-ho than the director was. "You take him off the line for tests and it's pretty certain he won't be coming back, isn't it? Well?"