“You mean a whole series of episodes?”
“That’s it.”
“You got a series all at once? In a split second?”
“That’s right. Look, for that split second I was her, don’t you see? I was her, everything she’d ever done, everything she’d ever thought and heard and felt. Everything, everything, all in the right order if I wanted to bring it out like that. Any part of it if I wanted it by itself. If I’m going to tell you about what I had for lunch, do I have to tell you everything else I’ve ever done since I was born? No. I tell you I was her, and then and forever after I can remember anything she could remember up to that point. In just that one flash.”
“A gestalt,” he murmured.
“Aha!” I said, and thought about that. I thought about a whole lot of things. I put them aside for a moment and said, “Why didn’t I know all this before?”
“You had a powerful block against recalling it.”
I got up excitedly. “I don’t see why. I don’t see that at all.”
“Just natural revulsion,” he guessed. “How about this? You had a distaste for assuming a female ego, even for a second.”
“You told me yourself, right at the beginning, that I didn’t have that kind of a problem.”
“Well, how does this sound to you? You say you felt pain in that episode. So—you wouldn’t go back into it for fear of re-experiencing the pain.”
“Let me think, let me think. Yeah, yeah, that’s part of it—that thing of going into someone’s mind. She opened up to me because I reminded her of Lone. I went in. I wasn’t ready; I’d never done it before, except maybe a little, against resistance. I went all the way in and it was too much; it frightened me away from trying it for years. And there it lay, wrapped up, locked away. But as I grew older, the power to do that with my mind got stronger and stronger, and still I was afraid to use it. And the more I grew, the more I felt, down deep, that Miss Kew had to be killed before she killed the…what I am. My God!” I shouted. “Do you know what I am?”
“No,” he said. “Like to tell me about it?”
“I’d like to,” I said. “Oh, yes, I’d like that.”
He had that professional open-minded expression on his face, not believing or disbelieving, just taking it all in. I had to tell him, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t have enough words. I knew the things, but not the names for them.
Lone took the meanings and threw the words away.
Further back: “You read books. Read books for me.”
The look of his eyes. That—“opening up” thing.
I went over to Stern. He looked up at me. I bent close. First he was startled, then he controlled it, then he came even closer to me.
“My God,” he murmured. “I didn’t look at those eyes before. I could have sworn those irises spun like wheels…”
Stem read books. He’d read more books than I ever imagined had been written. I slipped in there, looking for what I wanted.
I can’t say exactly what it was like. It was like walking in a tunnel, and in this tunnel, all over the roof and walls, wooden arms stuck out at you, like the tiling at the carnival, the merry-go-round, the thing you snatch the brass rings from. There’s a brass ring on the end of each of these arms, and you can take any one of them you want to.
Now imagine you make up your mind which rings you want, and the arms hold only those. Now picture yourself with a thousand hands to grab the rings off with. Now just suppose the tunnel is a zillion miles long, and you can go from one end of it to the other, grabbing rings, in just the time it takes you to blink once. Well, it was like that, only easier.
It was easier for me to do than it had been for Lone.
Straightening up, I got away from Stern. He looked sick and frightened.
“It’s all right,” I said.
“What did you do to me?”
“I needed some words. Come on, come on. Get professional.”
I had to admire him. He put his pipe in his pocket and gouged the tips of his fingers hard against his forehead and cheeks. Then he sat up and he was okay again.
“I know,” I said. “That’s how Miss Kew felt when Lone did it to her.”
“What are you?”
“I’ll tell you. I’m the central ganglion of a complex organism which is composed of Baby, a computer; Bonnie and Beanie, teleports; Jane, telekineticist; and myself, telepath and central control. There isn’t a single thing about any of us that hasn’t been documented: the teleportation of the Yogi, the telekinetics of some gamblers, the idio-savant mathematicians, and most of all, the so-called poltergeist, the moving about of household goods through the instrumentation of a young girl. Only in this case every one of my parts delivers at peak performance.
“Lone organized it, or it formed around him; it doesn’t matter which. I replaced Lone, but I was too underdeveloped when he died, and on top of that I got an occlusion from that blast from Miss Kew. To that extent you were right when you said the blast made me sub-consdously afraid to discover what was in it. But there was another good reason for my not being able to get in under that ‘Baby is three’ barrier.
“We ran into the problem of what it was I valued more than the security Miss Kew gave us. Can’t you see now what it was? My gestalt organism was at the point of death from that security. I figured she had to be killed or it—I—would be. Oh, the parts would live on: two little colored girls with a speech impediment, one introspective girl with an artistic bent, one mongoloid idiot, and me—ninety per cent short-circuited potentials and ten per cent juvenile delinquent.” I laughed. “Sure, she had to be killed. It was self-preservation for the gestalt.”
Stern hobbled around with his mouth and finally got out: “I don’t —”
“You don’t need to,” I laughed. “This is wonderful. You’re fine, hey, fine. Now I want to tell you this, because you can appreciate a fine point in your specialty. You talk about occlusions! I couldn’t get past the ‘Baby is three’ thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn’t find that out because I was afraid to remember that I had failed in the thing I had to do to save the gestalt. Ain’t that purty?”
“Failed? Failed how?”
“Look. I came to love Miss Kew, and I’d never loved anything before. Yet I had reason to kill her. She had to be killed; I couldn’t kill her. What does a human mind do when presented with imperative, mutually exclusive alternatives?”
“It-it might simply quit. As you phrased it earlier, it might blow a fuse, retreat, refuse to function in that area.”
“Well, I didn’t do that. What else?”
