To Ride Pegasus

Lajos laughed, brushing his hair back from his forehead as he remembered his frantic homeward flight. Beneath his arm, he could feel Ruth relaxing. A slight smile touched her lips.

“Dorotea will have an unusual opportunity, my dear. One denied you and Lajos, and myself, and so many other potential Talents. She has the chance to grow up in her Talent, learning to use it as naturally as she learns to walk and talk.

We will all help her to understand it…as much as we do ourselves,” he added with a wry smile. “To be candid, Ruth, we are in much the same position as your daughter. We are all learning to act in a publicly acceptable fashion with this new facet of human evolution. Psionic Talents are in their infancy, too, you know.

“You might even extend the analogy a little to include the Andres Bill, which we hope will afford all Talents professional status and legal protection. We, in effect, must prove to the public, our parent-body, if you wish, that we are not ‘bad,’ ‘naughty’ or ‘capricious’ children. Dorotea has already contributed something to that end,” and op Owen caught himself before he explained his own revelation. “Dorotea needs love and reassurance, discipline and understanding. She’ll pick that up from you, Ruth, with your warmth and sweetness. I want her, possibly more than you do, to have a normal, happy childhood so that she will be a normal, happy adult.”

He rose, smiling at the baby’s infectious gaiety.

“See, she knows how pleased we are with her right now, the little rascal.”

Op Owen left, assuring them new quarters within the week. Ruth was so quiet and thoughtful that Lajos remained home the rest of the day. He found the revelation of Dorotea’s Talent as much a shock as Ruth apparently did. However, by morning, he was consumed with a paternal pride and, in the succeeding days, discovered an overweening tendency to maunder on about his daughter’s prowess. By the time they moved to the larger, shielded apartment, he was accustomed to the notion and, since Dorotea made no more frantic summonses, succeeded in ignoring it.

Until he noticed the gradual change in Ruth. At first, it was no more than a sudden frown, quickly erased, or a nervous look towards the baby’s room if she slept longer than usual. Then he caught Ruth looking at her child with that wary expression he had once privately called ‘the Freak Look,’ which un-Talented people occasionally directed at him when they discovered his affiliation with the Center.

“You’ve got to stop that, honey,” he blurted out. “You’ve got to keep thinking… strongly…that Dorotea is just like other kids. Or you’ll prejudice her. Which is the one thing we have to avoid.”

Ruth vehemently denied the accusation but she turned so white around the lips that Lajos gathered her quickly into his arms.

“Ah, sweetie, she hasn’t changed just because we’ve found out she’s Talented.

But she is perceptive and she can sense your feelings towards her. You start suppressing that ‘freak-feeling’ right now. You think positively that she’s our beautiful baby girl, sweet and loving, kind and thoughtful. She’ll have that opinion of herself and it won’t matter that she’s a strong TP as well. She’ll merely consider that part of the whole bit. It’s when she senses criticism and restraint and hypocrisy that we’ll be in trouble. I had to get used to it, too, Ruthie. Say,” and he tilted her chin up and grinned down at her reassuringly, “why don’t we get a little help from op Owen? Talk this over with him. He can put a block on if you need one.”

The very suggestion that she couldn’t love and understand her own child made

Ruth indignant. She’d had years of parent training. She understood every phase of early childhood development. She adored Dorotea and she certainly wouldn’t do a thing that might jeopardize her daughter’s happiness. They both felt better after such a candid discussion and the problem was shelved.

“Sir, I thought you ought to see the Horvath charts,” Lester Welch told op Owen.

“A variation keeps appearing in Ruth Horvath’s. See?” and Welch unrolled the paper, pointing here and there to the almost imperceptible alteration in Ruth’s normal pattern. “See, here and here, it’s a couple of microseconds longer and broader. It begins to broaden minutely until it hits this frame which has remained constant. Now, compare her time-sequence to Lajos’s…and remember we’re picking up her pattern anywhere in the new apartment just as we pick up his from the office.”

Op Owen saw the correlation immediately.

“He’s finished no precog in six weeks?”

Welch contented himself with a nod as op Owen studied the graphs.

“If I didn’t think it was impossible, I’d say Ruth was suppressing him. But how?”

“Don’t you mean why?”

“That, too, of course, but ‘how’ is the bigger question.”

“If you mean the type of pattern, Dave, I can’t give you that. There isn’t enough to identify it as a known variation.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I meant, although I would like a magnification of this to study. Can you put on a more sensitive gauge, or a faster needle, to lengthen the stroke?”