Luckily for him, the war ended that week.
The Bio-Chem people had come up with the weapon that had ended it. At last turn, the Artificial Wombs had proved useless. The final weapon was a virus released on the Chinese mainland at roughly the same time the generals were discovering Timothy’s limitations. Before they could dissect him, the speedy killer had wiped out approximately one half the Chinese male population—as it was structured to affect only certain chromosome combinations in only the Mongoloid race—and had induced the enemy into a reluctant surrender.
Plans for dissection went astray. The Wombs were put under the administration of the Bio-Chem people, and they dissolved the project. The Bio-Chems were fascinated by Timothy. For three weeks, he was exhaustively tested and retested. He gave so many spoon-lifting demonstrations that he saw floating spoons in his sleep. And he heard their discussions about “what his brain might look like.” It was a rugged three weeks.
But in the end they didn’t saw him up to satisfy their curiosity. Somewhere along the line, a leak had reached the press, and the story of the horribly crippled mutant who could lift spoons without touching them was a Three Day Sensation. During the excitement of those three days, the largest bureau of the now peace-oriented government, the Veteran’s Bureau, stepped in and took control of him. Senator Kilroy announced that the Veteran’s Bureau was going to rehabilitate the young man, provide him with grav plate servo-hands and a grav plate system for mobility. He was a Three Day Sensation again. And so was the politically wise senator who took credit for the project. . .
Timothy (or “Ti” as he went by now, having never assumed a surname after gaining his freedom) stood on the patio that jutted beyond the cliff and watched the birds settling noisily into the big green pines that spread thickly down the mountainside. Behind him was the house that had been built from the money acquired from his book advances—Autobiography of a Reject and A Case For Artificial Birth—a proud monument of a structure erected over the ruins of a Revolutionary War pro-British secret supplies cellar. He cherished the house and what it contained, for it was ninety percent of his world. The other ten percent was his business. He was shrewd, and his business paid off. He used the receipts chiefly to maintain the house and to buy his books and the films for his private projection room. He had organized and launched, with his writing monies, the first stat newspaper designed solely for entertainment. No news. Just eossip and gossip and more gossip. It was a ten-page scandal sheet that stated out of the wall printers in eleven million homes promptly at eight in the morning and four thirty in the afternoon. But now his business was not with him in his thoughts, and he focused his attention on the birds that fluttered below. He directed his left servo-hand to pull apart the branches obscuring his view of a particularly fine specimen. The six-fingered prostho swept away from him on the grav plates that cored its palm, shot forty feet down the embankment to the offending branch and gently pulled it aside so as not to disturb the birds.
But the birds were too aware: they flew. Using his limited psi power, Ti reached into the two hundred miniature switches of the control module buried in the globe of the grav plate system that capped his truncated legs. The switches, operated by his psi power, in turn maneuvered his hands and moved him about on his grav plate sphere as he wished. He recalled his left servo-hand now that the bird had gone. It rushed back to him and floated at his left side, directly out from his shoulder, just as the right hand floated on the other side.
He looked at his watch and was surprised to find it was past time for his usual morning chat with Taguster. He flipped the mini-switches, floated around and through the patio doors into the plush living room. He moved across the fur carpet and glided into the special cup-chair of his Mindlink set. He raised a servo-hand and pulled down the glittering helmet, fitting it securely to his bony cranium (it too had been specially crafted), reached out with the other servo and threw the proper toggles to shift his mind into the receiver in Taguster’s living room. There was a moment of blurring when intense blacks and grays swarmed formlessly about him. His mind flashed on the Mindlink Company beam past thousands of other minds going to other receivers, covered the forty miles to the city and Taguster’s house. The blacks and grays swirled dizzingly, then cleared and turned into colors. The first thing he saw through the receiver camera was Taguster lying dead against the wall