out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We’ve
threatened the little freak. We’ve tried bribing him. The
trouble is, he has no fear or ambition.” He had almost
said “tortured” for “threatened” but was a good enough
self-censor to change words without a pause. “You simply
go into his head and make sure he doesn’t hold anything
back.”
“How much did you say?” I asked.
“A hundred thousand poscreds an hour.”
It pained him to say that.
“Double that,” I said. For many men, the single hun-
dred thou was more than a year’s salary in these time of
inflation.
“What? Absurd!”
He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn’t
even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that,
among other things, the child had given them an almost
completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would
make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone,
a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hun-
dred big ones with an option to demand more if the work
proved more demanding than I anticipated.
“Without your shyster, you’d be working for room and
board,” Morsfagen said.
He had an ugly face.
“Without your brass medals, you’d be a street-gang
punk,” I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.
He wanted to hit me.
His fists made flesh balls, and the knuckles nearly
pierced the skin—they protruded so harshly.
I laughed at him.
He couldn’t risk it. He needed me too much.
The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair
and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the
most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke
of madness.
III
The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been
moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all
that transpired.
“The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part
of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.
After he’s placed in a state of trance, we administer 250
cc’s of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular.” The white-
smocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp,
pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the
maintenance of one of his machines.
The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the
scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and
not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I
was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by
the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my
chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something
were trying to burst free of me.
“What’s his name?” I asked Morsfagen.
“He hasn’t any.”
“No?”
“No. We have his code name, as always. We don’t need
more.”
I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some
churches deny me one; but then churches have been
denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the
world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the
galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of
inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed
for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.
A team of doctors administered the drug.
“Within the next five minutes,” Morsfagen said. He had
both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn’t
anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that
overhung the room.
I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be
there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the
confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his
unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for
the assault upon his mental sanctity.
Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the
blackness of his mind, flailing . . .
… and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes
where the eyes should have been.
They mumbled things in their alien language, and they
prodded me with cold instruments.
When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange
triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physi-
cian who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue