I was drinking beer and eating Cajun shrimp with Manny Escobar and Bobby Montero when I heard about David Ogden. The shrimp joint was a shack off Route 90 outside of Houma, but there was a television set mounted on the wall and the word was on the eleven o'clock news. David Ogden, World War II hero, and number three man in the CIA, was dead. The news didn't move me much. The Agency owns me and my friends lock, stock, and barrel, but they don't own us body and soul. The relationship is love-hate, easy on the love. We do what they tell us to do, within reason, but that doesn't mean that we sleep in the same bed. Manny knew that, but he had to give me the needle.
"Bad news, Ben," he said. "Please accept my sincere condolences on the loss of your leader. I feel for you."
Bobby didn't know me that well, but he saw the way Manny was going, and he got into it. He laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. "Mister Slade, maybe you should go back to the motel and change into something black."
"Black, tu culo," I told him.
"Oh, no, Mister Slade, not mine. Mine is pink; como una rosa en el mes de mayo. You gonna go to the funeral?"
"Not me. I might be tempted to piss on his grave."
Manny shook his head. "Bad luck to talk like that."
"Maybe you should just send flowers," said Bobby. He was big, and flabby, and his lips were greasy from the shrimp. "I heard about that guy, I heard he went crazy. I heard he had the brain cancer."
I nodded. "Tumors."
"Menos mal. In a job like that it helps to be a little crazy."
I didn't argue the point, it was too close to the truth. "You mean you don't have any crazies in your outfit? Is that what you mean?"
They looked at each other. They both were Cuban, and they worked for the DEA. They decided to laugh. Manny said, "You get crazies everywhere. Especially at the top."
"Shit floats," was Bobby's contribution. "Who gets this guy's job?"
"Man called Jessup."
"Is he crazy, too?"
"Give him time."
I pressed the icy beer bottle against my forehead. It was February, but the night was hot and moist, Louisiana muggy. The shrimp joint was five miles up the road from the 7-Eleven where the meet was supposed to go down at two in the morning. Tailgate party in the parking lot, fifty thousand in cash for a small barrel of China White. We had the money under the table in a carrying case that looked like the satchel your Aunt Edna left behind the last time she came to visit. Manny had it between his feet. He was slouched in his chair munching shrimp, relaxed and easy, but his feet were clamped on that case. He was out of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, while Bobby was local. I was there on loan, which was common enough. The Agency farmed us out like mules to places like the FBI and the DEA. I had worked with Manny before, and he knew what I did for a living. It was different with Bobby. He knew that I had some sort of connection with the Agency, but he didn't know what it was and he didn't know why I was there. I was happy to leave it that way. He probably wouldn't have believed the truth, and if he had it would have made him edgy. Normal people get that way when people like me are around. Even with Manny, who was a friend, there was a wall between us. It was thin, but it was there. He knew that I could look into his head and see what he was thinking, and nobody normal likes that.
Bobby grabbed a handful of shrimp, and called over his shoulder for another beer. He stuffed shrimp into his mouth, chewed, and spat the shells onto the floor. He had the table manners of an alligator. He grinned at me, and said, "Yeah, I know. I'm a slob."
"As long as you know it," I told him.
"That's nothing," said Manny. He looked amused. "You should see him eat ribs. The bones fly."
"I'll pass."
The girl who was working the tables came with the beer, and Bobby watched her walk back to the bar, her haunches rolling. She was chubby, and she wasn't wearing much. She was fifteen at the most, and the chub was baby fat.
Bobby said speculatively, "You know what I'm thinking?"
I knew exactly what he was thinking. I was inside his head, tapping him. He was thinking in crude and graphic terms about taking the girl back to the motel with him. He didn't have much imagination.
"Come off it," said Manny. "She's just a kid."
"I know it, I know it." Bobby made a show of licking his lips. "Around here she's legal."
"Christ, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You got a daughter that age."
"My daughter isn't bad for her age. You should try her sometimes."
"I already did. She's almost as good as your wife."
That was the level of the conversation. We sat at the table with the shrimp and the beer until after midnight, then we drove around until it was time to set up the meet. Bobby and Manny had been working on it for over a month, trying to make a buy from an organization that was flooding the lower parishes with quality coke. They were working without the local law, which Manny thought might be leaky. Bobby was working undercover, and it had taken him the month to set up the first buy. The buy was a teaser with no one due to get busted. If it went down smoothly then Bobby moved up the line to the next supplier, step-by-step, until they got to the people who were worth taking down. The meeting was one-on-one, only one of them with the merchandise and Bobby by himself with the satchel in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven at two in the morning. Manny would be there on a roof to back him up, and I would be there because Bobby couldn't wear a wire.
The trouble is television, too many drug agents wear wires. Well, the bad guys watch television, too, and now every time a major buy goes down the buyer gets a skin search. So it takes some balls to wear a wire these days, but there are times when it has to be done, mostly when recorded evidence is needed. That wasn't the case here. No one was getting busted, and the only need for a wire was to make sure that Bobby didn't get himself iced. He'd be sitting out in the open with a satchel full of cash, dealing with people he didn't know, and there had to be a way for him to call in the Marines. A wire back to Manny on the roof would have given him the protection, but they couldn't use a wire and so they had to use me. I do it without wires.
We split up at one o'clock. Manny and I left the car a half mile from the 7-Eleven, and Bobby went on alone, the satchel on the seat beside him. Manny and I went overland, down the embankment at the side of the road, and along a series of gullies, the sawtooth grass tearing at our ankles and knees. I was empty-handed, but Manny had his weapon in a gun bag over his shoulder. It was a sniper's rifle, a Dragunov with a telescopic sight. It wasn't heavy, but it was bulky, and it made the going difficult for him. The gullies were wet with runoff water, filled with slick rocks, and every time that Manny slipped he cursed softly.
We came out of the gully in back of the 7-Eleven, and climbed the emergency ladder up to the roof. The roof was flat and tarred, and with a waist-high façade at the front that gave plenty of cover. The parking lot below was dark and almost deserted. Only Bobby's car was there, parked directly in front of the store. I had picked the spot for him. My maximum range is one hundred and fifty feet, and the car was well within it. Manny set up the Dragunov on its tripod, zeroed it in on the driver's side of Bobby's car, and we settled in to wait.
I tuned into Bobby's head. Sitting down there in the car, staring out into the night, he was still thinking about that kid in the shrimp joint. He had her twisted into an impossible position. Or maybe it was possible, but not for anybody I knew. I told Manny, and he laughed.
"Bobby is okay," he said. "It's just that he's still growing up."
I figured Bobby for about forty. "How much further does he have to go?"
"Well, you know how it is. Some people never get there at all."
"He'd better be there tonight."
"Shit, you don't have to worry about Bobby that way. He's a good man on the job."
"It isn't a job for a middle-aged adolescent."
"Look, I've worked with him before. I'm telling you he's all right."
"If you say so."
"I say so." He was silent for a long moment. I didn't have to go into his head to sense his disapproval. "You don't like people much, do you?"
I didn't bother to answer.
"I guess it's that thing that you do, getting into people's heads, see what they're thinking. If I could do that, I guess I'd start playing God just like you."
"You know me better than that, Manny."
"I know you, and that's why I'm saying it. You see too much of the bad side of people, stuff that shouldn't be seen, except maybe by God. That's why you're down on people."
"You figure that God is down on people?" "I've known it all my life."
"Then how come I'm not down on you? How come I think that you're a mature, stable personality without a blemish or a flaw?"
"Well, shit, that's me. Everybody knows I'm perfect." He grinned in the darkness. "But you're down on people, that's for sure. I guess you can't help it. Like what you said about Ogden, about pissing on his grave. You shouldn't have said that." "The man was a prick."
"Maybe so. Bobby and me, we've got pricks in our outfit, too, but you'll never hear us say it in front of an outsider." "You just said it."
"That was just to make a point. You'll never hear me say it again." "I've got a different situation, Manny." "How?"
I wanted to tell him how. I wanted to tell him how his outfit was engaged in a clear-cut battle that allowed for simple loyalties. I wanted to tell him how the chessmasters at Langley, men like Ogden and Jessup, moved their pieces around the board with an icy precision, casually sacrificing pawns for the good of the game. I wanted to tell him how many of those broken pawns I'd seen swept off the board in places like Afghanistan and Nicaragua. I wanted to tell him all that, but just then a white El Dorado turned off the highway and into the parking lot.
Manny whispered, "Show time." He went into his crouch behind the Dragunov, his finger on the trigger and his eye fixed to the scope.
The El Dorado pulled up next to Bobby's car. There were two men in the front seat, which meant that they were breaking the agreement, but, then, so were we. The driver stayed behind the wheel. The dealer got out of the car and came over to Bobby's window. Bobby looked out, and grinned up at him.
"You got it?" asked the dealer.
"Sure, I got it," said Bobby. "You got yours?"
"I got it. Get out of the car and let's talk."
"I don't have to get out, I can talk from here." Bobby had the motor running, the gear engaged, and the clutch floored. He was ready to roll. "I don't see nothing. Where is it?"
"In the car. Come on, let's see your end."
"Hey, you crazy? You don't show me nothing, and you want to see my end?"
"Look, don't fuck with me."
"You're the one who's fucking around. Let's see the stuff."
"It's in the car."
"You said a barrel, so let's see the barrel."
"Get out of the car, I got to check you for wire."
"You check me once I see the merchandise."
"I check you, then I see the money."
"Bullshit, it don't work that way."
"You're jerking me off, you don't have any money."
"Hey, do things right. Show me the merchandise."
They were bellowing at each other. It sounded like the usual ranking, pushing for an edge, but by now I was into the dealer's head, and I knew it was a burn. I made a deep tap to be sure. There was merchandise in the El Dorado, but it wasn't for sale. It never had been. It had always been a burn, get the cash and run, and Bobby was due to go down. The dealer's weapon was in his belt, and he was ready to use it, but he wanted to see the money first. He was working himself up to it with all that shouting.
Manny whispered, "What is it?"
"A burn," I told him.
"You sure?"
I was sure. I was into the dealer's head, and I could see it clearly. "You don't have much time. You'd better drop him."
"Shit."
He didn't want to do it. Doing it would blow everything that they'd worked on for the past month, but he had no choice. He fired, and killed the dealer. The bullet went in through the top of the head. He didn't have to do it that way. He could have dropped the dealer without killing him, but his partner was under the gun, and he wasn't taking any chances.
The dealer went down, and when Bobby heard the shot he hit the accelerator. The car raced across the lot to the far end, skidded into a one-eighty, and came roaring back directly at the El Dorado. The driver of the El Dorado had a weapon out the window, firing. Bobby kept on coming. Manny put three shots into the roof of the El Dorado, and the driver popped out with his hands up. Bobby braked just short of hitting him, then he was out of the car and had the driver spread out on the hood. He was quick, and he was sure, and he wasn't thinking about teenage poon.
Bobby had the driver cuffed and his face in the gravel by the time that Manny and I got down to the lot. Manny knelt over the body of the dealer. The dealer's hands were empty; his pistol was tucked in his belt. Manny eased it out with a pencil, and dropped it into the dealer's right hand. He closed the hand around the butt, then let it go. The pistol dropped to the ground.
I must have made a noise, because Manny looked up at me, and asked, "You feel like playing God again?"
"No," I said, "but how do you know he was right-handed?"
"I don't. I'm just going with the odds."
Bobby came over and looked at the body. "The bastards," he said. He had a hard time getting the words out. He was breathing hard. He knew how close it had been.
It was time to bring in the local law, and Bobby was elected to drive into Houma to get them. Before he left, Manny took the satchel from the car. "The way they pay the cops around here," he explained, "they don't eat too regular."
When Bobby was gone, we checked to see that the driver was secure, and then we sat on the hood of the El Dorado to wait. The frogs started up in the stillness, masses of them croaking in the wetlands behind us. Manny said, "You ever go for frogs when you were a kid?"
"No."
"Didn't think so. Don't find many frogs in the big city."
"Wrong. Little town in north Texas, but no frogs worth going for."
"You don't talk like Texas."
"Not any more, it's been a while." I could have told him that he didn't talk like Cuba any more, but he knew better than that.
"We used to go for frogs when I was little. Not here, in Cuba. Big bastards, meat like a chicken leg. Catch enough and the whole family had frogs for dinner."
"Do you go for them here?"
"Not worth it. Too much work for what you get. I guess it's something for kids to do." And then, without a pause, "What do you think of Bobby now?"
"He did the job," I admitted.
"You see him come straight at that sumbitch?" He jerked his chin at the driver on the ground.
"I saw it."
"He didn't have to do that. He could have let me finish it, but that's the way he is. He gets the blood up and you can't stop him."
So Bobby was a slob and a cretin, but he could do the job. That didn't change my opinion of him, but it was the wrong time to say something like that. All I said was, "You were right. I had him wrong."
Manny nodded, satisfied. "What he doesn't know is that you saved his ass."
"Part of my job."
"Yeah, I know, but it's one hell of a job. I don't know how you do it, but there's nobody like you. You're one in a million, kid."
He was wrong, and he was right. There were many others like me all over the world, and we were, in fact, one in a million. That was the statistic most commonly used. It wasn't exact, but it was close enough: one sensitive for every million of population. I had heard it all my life. I was one in a million.
It was a long night with the police, and with a fussy type from the office of the prosecuting attorney of the parish. They weren't happy about having us in the neighborhood without notice, but they never are and it's something they live with. All they could do was look disapproving. I was carrying DEA credentials for the job, and so there wasn't any heat on me, but the paperwork was staggering and it was midday before we got back to the motel. That was just the local formalities. We slept through the afternoon and the night, and the next day we went up to New Orleans to take care of the federal end of it. I faded into the background there. I couldn't show my DEA papers to the Feds, and there was no justifiable reason for an employee of the Federal Center for the Study of Childhood Diseases to have been involved in a drug operation. So Manny carried the ball at the Federal Court House on Camp Street, and by the late afternoon it was all over.
We went back to the hotel to shower and change, and Manny and Bobby were ready to party. They had been on the job for a month, and they had some steam to blow. "You got to come along," said Bobby. His lips were loose and wet. "There's this place in the Quarter, they got bucking bulls and the girls with no clothes on."
Manny added, "They make great ribs, too."
I flashed a vision of Bobby drinking boilermakers in a cowboy bar and playing Henry the Eighth with a side of pork. I tried to look regretful. "Count me out, I'm beat. I really am. I need an early night."
"You can sleep tomorrow," said Manny. "Come on, you'll have a good time."
"Right now my idea of a good time is a broiled lobster and a bottle of wine, but I want them served in my room with the bed so close that I can fall into it."
"Chickenshit."
"That's me."
"We'll miss you." He gave me a tight smile. "Aside from playing God, you're also a bit of a snob, aren't you?"
"Just a bit, Manny, just a bit. I try not to let it show."
But I didn't get the lobster, I didn't get the wine, and I didn't get to sleep that night. An hour later Sammy Warsaw called from the Center and told me to get my ass up there. Sammy is like a brother to me, but he runs the Center now, and he tends to be peremptory. "No excuses," he said. "I want you here by noon tomorrow."
"Sammy, in case it slipped your mind, I just came off a job and my bones are breaking. Tomorrow I'll probably slide down to the coast, lie in the sun, and maybe try for some snapper."
"You'll be here tomorrow."
I figured the days. "Maybe Friday."
"There's a flight out of New Orleans in an hour. Be on it."
"Forget it."
"Do you want me to make it an order?"
I laughed. We don't give each other orders. "Now I know you're joking."
"No joke, I'm calling in the troops."
"All of them?" I couldn't imagine him recalling every one of the two hundred-odd aces that we have spread out all over the world.
"The senior aces," he said patiently. "You and Vince, Martha and Snake."
"And you." He was the boss now, but he still was one of us.
"And me," he agreed. "I want you all in my office at twelve sharp."
"What is it, World War III, or did somebody lose the key to the Men's Room?"
"All I know is that I got a call about an hour ago. I'm supposed to have the five of us on tap at noon tomorrow. There'll be some visitors from the Agency arriving about then."
"Delaney?" Roger Delaney was the Deputy Director for Science and Technology, and as such he controlled our finances, our security, and our assignments. He was the one person from the Agency who had access to the Center.
"Delaney and a few others." Sammy sounded unhappy.
"That's against the rules."
"I'm afraid that we're bending the rules this time."
"Then it has to be something hot."
"And you have to be here."
"You're a hard man, Sammy."
"Do you want this fucking job? You can have it, you know."
I hung up, and an hour later I was on my way home.
I have an apartment in Manhattan in a cold and sterile building, but that isn't what I call home. I have a cottage on the Jersey shore, but that isn't home, either. There's that Texas town where I was born, but it never was home to me, and never will be. Home is a state of mind, and mine is in the state of Virginia. To get to my home you leave Washington on Interstate 95 going south into the Virginia countryside for almost an hour. You pass the Marine base at Quantico, and leave the Interstate at Fredericksburg, following the state road southeast with the Rappahannock River on your left and the Nathan Bedford Forrest Military Reservation on your right. You skirt the perimeter of the reservation edging southward, and after three miles you turn onto a dirt road that is marked by a faded sign that reads: FEDERAL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF CHILDHOOD DISEASES-AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. From the turnoff you can see the first of the manned gates and the tops of the buildings beyond the fence. When I reach that turnoff, I know that I'm home. When you reach that turnoff, you've gone as far as you can go.
I left my rented car at the manned gate, and passed into the Center on foot. Inside me was a rolling excitement, a childish glee. It was birthday time and Christmas rolled into one, for this had been my home from the age of twelve, and coming back was like no other feeling in the world. Only Center personnel could clear the gate; Agency people stayed on the other side of the wire. On their side were the barracks, the motor pool, and the security headquarters; all squat and functional buildings. On our side was the fieldstone and ivy-covered structures of the Center: the separate living quarters for the aces and the students, the double-winged administration building, the mess hall and lounge, the long, low block of the hospital and research complex, the athletic fields and the swimming pools.
Sammy met me at the gate. He ran the place now, but he was guided by a courtesy long out of fashion. His greeting, however, was anything but courteous. The guard at the gate could have heard him, and so he spoke to me head-to-head.
Late, as usual, he said. What is it with you, can't you ever he on time? The others are up in the office.
Don't blame me, blame Delta. Are the visitors here yet?
Not yet. They're as bad as you are. Worse.
Any idea what it's all about?
He shook his head. I don't know any more than I knew last night. We'll find out soon enough.
What are the rules? No tapping? One of the many agreements that we had with the Agency people was that we did not go into their heads. It was a rule that we observed at our convenience.
Sammy shrugged. Use your own judgment. He was sore about them bringing in unauthorized personnel, and he wasn't trying to hide it.
We walked together up the tree-lined road that led to the administration building. It was a quiet day, and the only noises that came to us were those of the birds, and the shouts of a faraway group of kids on the soccer field. The place looked more like a small-town college than anything else, and with good reason. No matter what the signs said, our side of the wire had only one function, the study and training of sensitives. The Federal Center for the Study of Childhood Diseases was a fiction to discourage the curious, and the actual workings of the Center was classified information. Aside from our own people, only a selected few in high places knew of the existence of the Center. It was the same with all the other countries that used sensitives: the research center was always affiliated with the intelligence branch of the government. It had to be that way. In our case the budget of the Center ran into more money than any institution in the private sector could handle. Only the government could afford to pick up the tab, and that meant the CIA. The Agency and the Center were joined hip and thigh in a relationship that was often strained, but never had been broken.
The layout of the Center showed the nature of that relationship. We were on the inside of the fence, and they were on the outside. They were very much in control. In exchange for all the money, in exchange for the Center, in exchange for our very existence, we worked for them. They owned us, every single one of us.
"The kid," said Martha, "is a monster. I'm sorry to have to put it that way, but that's what he is. A monster."
"The kid," said Vince, "is a kid. And all kids are monsters."
"Not like this one. He's truly nasty."
"He'll grow out of it," said Snake.
"He refuses to study."
I said, "Motivate him."
"He disrupts the class."
"Apply peer pressure."
"And," Martha made her final point, "he's a terror with the girls."
"There you are," said Vince. "I knew he couldn't be all bad."
Sammy smiled, but did not look up from his work. We sat in his office waiting for our visitors from the Agency, Sammy at his desk, and the rest of us spread over couches and chairs. Sammy's work was a stack of requisition forms, and he checked each one carefully before putting his initials on it. He never had wanted to run the Center, never had wanted to have anything to do with administration, but now he had the job and he was doing his best with it. He had been happiest in the field when the five of us had worked as a team. We were all the same age, had come to the Center in the same year as children, and had grown up together with ties far tighter than actual kinship could have produced. Not that we were in any way alike. Sammy Warsaw, with his frizzy hair and his batwing ears, his sharp wit and keen intellect, was the first among equals. Vince Bonepart, big and black, had the profile of an Assyrian god and the body of an NFL linebacker. Martha Marino was everybody's Earth Mother, gentle to the bone, while Claudia, called Snake, was as slim as a boy and as daring as a wildcat. And then were was me, Ben Slade.
We rarely operated as a team anymore, and Sammy had called us in from independent assignments: me from Louisiana, Vince from his translation post at the U.N., and Snake from an interrogation in Seattle. Martha had not had to travel at all; she was on temporary assignment at the Center, teaching. We all took a turn at that once every year, working with the kids whose powers were the same as ours, but who still had to learn how to handle them. The Center had a staff of teachers for the normal curriculum, but it took a sensitive to teach another one how to live with the responsibility that went with the talent. I had always found it to be a rewarding experience, but Martha had caught a rough one with Little, and he was driving her up the wall.
"He's anything but little," she said to Vince. "He's only sixteen and he's almost as big as you are. And nobody calls him Amos anymore. Chicken Little, that's his name now."
"I like it, but why Chicken?"
"That's his favorite game. You know, going head-to-head with cars, first one to turn away is chicken. Well, Amos never turns. Never."
"Here in the Center? Where do they get the cars?"
Snake laughed. "Where did we get them when we were here?" She had a right to laugh. When we were kids, nobody was quicker or better than Snake at lifting a jeep from the motor pool.
"The other day he talked another kid into doing it with forklift trucks. Can you imagine two forklifts going head-to-head? It was like a pair of saber-toothed tigers."
More laughter.
"You can laugh," said Martha, her voice troubled, "but I'm really worried about the boy. I'm beginning to think he's not right in the head."
The laughter reached a new level. "Did I hear you right?" I asked. "Not right in the head? Do you remember what you were like when you came here? Do you remember what we all were like?"
The laughter stopped in sympathy for Martha. There was nothing she could say in answer to those questions, although she knew the answers well enough. Before coming to the Center, we all had been quite mad.
The Center had found Martha in a home for retarded children in Omaha. She had been there for a year. She heard voices in her head that no one else could hear. When she heard the voices she went wild. She screamed for hours, she clawed her body, she soiled herself. When the Center found her she was under constant restraint and sedation. She was twelve years old.
The Center had found Vince tucked away in the corner of a drug-abuse program in Boston. Vince also heard the voices. His parents had abandoned him when he was seven, and after that he had lived in the streets. He had learned from his elders how to boost drunks and how to shoot smack. The smack kept the voices quiet. He was kicking when the Center found him, and the voices were back, filling his head with their howls. He was twelve years old.
The Center found Claudia in a religious commune in Idaho. The members of the group worshipped snakes. They also worshipped Claudia. When Claudia heard the voices she went into a trance and made hissing noises. That, to members of the commune, made her part of the godhead, a higher form of snake. They kept her in a cage and fed her what the snakes ate. When the Center found her she had not spoken a word for months, and she moved by slithering across the floor on her belly. She was twelve years old.
The Center found Sammy in an expensive sanitarium north of New York City. His parents had placed him there. He was catatonic, incapable of voluntary movement. He could not speak, and his limbs remained fixed in whatever position they were placed. His eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking. He had been that way since he first heard the voices. He was twelve years old.
The Center found me locked in the back bedroom of a shack in Freeman, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma line. The room had a bed, a chair, and a slop bucket. I was chained to the bed, and I was naked. My body was covered with old scars and fresh welts. The man I called my daddy said that the voices I heard were the tongues of the devil. He was a shade-tree mechanic and a part-time preacher, and he knew about devils. At the end of each day he whipped the devil out of me with a razor strop, and then prayed for my deliverance. When the Center found me I could not stand or sit, and my body was a festering wound. I was twelve years old.
That's what we had been, my generation at the Center, and other generations, before us and after, had come from the same sort of background: the abused, the imprisoned, the seemingly mad. At the Center we were cleansed, we were nourished, we were treated, we were loved, and we were taught how to live with the voices in our heads. They were the voices of the world around us. The lust of the satyr, the sloth of the slob, the greed of the avaricious, the jealousy of the discontented, the righteousness of the fanatic, the despair of the helpless, the flaring orange delight of the arsonist, and the screaming crimson of the psychopath-those were the voices that had howled around within our heads like winds in a cavern, and had blown us away into another world. It took time to learn how to live with those voices, and by the time we were sixteen most of us had managed it. Amos Little was one of the exceptions.
"I hate to say this," said Martha, and we all knew what was coming.
"Go ahead, spit it out," said Vince.
"He may be a deuce."
Nobody laughed at that. There was nothing funny about one of the kids turning out to be a deuce, a failed ace. It didn't happen very often, but it happened. A kid would come into the program with all the potential ability of a true sensitive, but the ability would never develop. A kid like that was left in limbo, neither a normal nor a sensitive, capable of limited communication, but useless in the field. There was nothing to do with a kid like that; he was in the system, and couldn't get out, but he could never truly be a part of it. He was a deuce, and around the Center the deuces were the hewers of wood and the haulers of water. I had known a few happy deuces, but I hadn't known many.
Snake asked, "What makes you think so?"
Martha shrugged. "The usual. He has a great deal of difficulty communicating head to head. He can do it, but not easily, and not all of the time."
"Any pain?"
"He says that it hurts his head when he tries to do it."
It was the classic sign of the failed ace, and it brought more silence. Sammy looked up from what he was doing, and said, "That doesn't have to mean that he's a deuce. I've known kids with the same problem, and they've broken through."
"So have I," said Martha, "but…" She waved the thought away. "I hope you're right."
The telephone rang. Sammy picked it up, said a few words, put it down, and announced, "Our visitors are here."