I am a digger into minds. I esp. I find secrets, know lies, answer questions. I esp. Some questions should go unanswered, but they do not always. And now there is a darkness in my soul . . .
It started with a nerve-jangling ring of the telephone.
I put down the book I was reading and answered the strident mechanical scream. “Hello?”
“Simeon?” He said it correctly (Sim-ee-on).
It was Harry Kirshire. I esped out and saw him standing in a room that was strange to me, nervously drumming his fingers on a simu-wood desk.
“What is it, Harry?”
“Sim, I have another job for you.”
He had long ago given up his legal practice to act as my agent.
“Why so nervous? What kind of a job?”
“A mountain of money. That’s all I can say.”
“More than the mint?”
“More than Midas.”
“Say no more.”
“We’ll expect you here at the Artificial Creation building in twenty minutes.”
“I’m on my way.” My stomach fluttered. The Artificial Creation Building. The womb.
I slipped into overshoes and a heavy coat. Without Harry Kirshire, I would most likely be imprisoned at the moment—or in what amounts to a prison. When the staff of Artificial Creation discovered my wild talents, the FBI attempted to impound me and use me as a “natural resource” under federal control. It had been Harry Kirshire who had fought the legal battle all the way to the Supreme Court. I was nine when we won the case—twelve long years ago.
It was snowing outside. I had to scrape the windscreen of the hovercar. One would imagine that, in 2004, Science could have dreamed up something to make ice scrapers obsolete.
I arrived at the AC building and floated the car in for a Marine attendant to park. Inside, I was ushered through a door into a cream-colored room with hex signs painted on the walls, a small, ugly child sitting in a leather chair, and four men standing behind him, staring at me as if I were expected to say something of monumental importance.
The child looked up, and his eyes and lips were hidden by the wrinkles of a century, by gray and gravelike flesh.
His voice crackled like papyrus being unrolled in an ancient tomb. “You’re the one,” he said in dust whispers. “You’re the one.”
“That’s the situation,” Harry said nervously.
The child-ancient’s eyes squinted out at me like burning coals sparkling beneath rotten vegetation. I could feel the hate consuming there, hate not just for me, but for everyone, everything. He, more so than I, was a freak of the Experimental Wombs. The doctors and supporting congressmen could gloat again: “Artificial Creation Is a Benefit to the Nation.” It had produced me, and twenty years later, this warped super-genius. Two successes in a quarter of a century.
“I don’t know if I can,” I said at last.
“Why not?” asked the uniformed hulk known as General Morsfagen.
“I don’t know what to expect. He obviously has a very different mind. Sure, I’ve esped army staff, the people working here at AC, FBI agents, and I have unfailingly sorted out the traitors. But this isn’t the same thing at all.”
“You don’t have to sort,” Morsfagen said. “I thought this had been made clear. He can formulate earth-shaking theories, but each time he fails to give us something vital in it. We’ve threatened and bribed,” Morsfagen almost said tortured, but didn’t finish. “You simply go in his head and make sure he doesn’t hold anything important back.”
“How much did you say?” I asked.
“Five hundred thousand pos-creds an hour.”
“Double that figure.”
“What? That’s absurd!” He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn’t flinch. I esped them and knew the child had half-discovered a means of star travel. For the rest of that theory alone, a million an hour was not ridiculous. They gave it to me with an option to demand more if the work proved more demanding than anticipated.
II
The lights had been dimmed; the machines had been moved in.
“The hex signs are part of the predrug hypnosis which the physicians must administer. After he is placed in a trancelike state, Cinnamide is hypoed to him.”