Jack of No Trades, Evelyn E. Smith [10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

I might have been considered superior, but in 2102 I was just the Faradays' idiot boy.

Exploring space should have been my hope. If there had been anything useful or interesting on any of the other planets, I might have found a niche for myself there. In totally new surroundings, the psi powers geared to another environment might not be an advantage. But by the time I was ten, it was discovered that the other planets were just barren hunks of rock, with pressures and climates and atmospheres drastically unsuited to human life. A year or so before, the hyperdrive had been developed on Earth and ships had been sent out to explore the stars, but I had no hope left in that direction any more.

I was an atavism in a world of peace and plenty. Peace, because people couldn't indulge in war or even crime with so many telepaths running around—not because, I told myself, the capacity for primitive behavior wasn't just as latent in everybody else as the psi talent seemed latent in me. Tim must be right, I thought—I must have some undreamed-of power that only the right circumstances would bring out. But what was that power?

For years I had speculated on what my potential talent might be, explored every wild possibility I could conceive of and found none productive of even an ambiguous result with which I could fool myself. As I approached adulthood, I began to concede that I was probably nothing more than what I seemed to be—a simple psi-negative. Yet, from time to time, hope surged up again, as it had today, in spite of my knowledge that my hope was an impossibility. Who ever heard of latent psi powers showing themselves in an individual as old as twenty-six?

I was almost alone in the parks where I used to walk, because people liked to commune with one another those days rather than with nature. Even gardening had very little popularity. But I found myself most at home in those woodland—or, rather, pseudo-woodland—surroundings, able to identify more readily with the trees and flowers than I could with my own kind. A fallen tree or a broken blossom would excite more sympathy from me than the minor catastrophes that will beset any household, no matter how gifted, and I would shy away from bloody noses or cut fingers, thus giving myself a reputation for callousness as well as extrasensory imbecility.

However, I was no more callous in steering clear of human breakdowns than I was in not shedding tears over the household machines when they broke down, for I felt no more closely akin to my parents and siblings than I did to the mechanisms that served and, sometimes, failed us.

On that day, I walked farther than I had intended and, by the time I got back home, I found the rest of my family had returned before me. They seemed to be excited about something and were surprised to see me so calm.

"Aren't you even interested in anything outside your own immediate concerns, Kev?" Sylvia demanded, despite Father's efforts to shush her.

"Can't you remember that Kev isn't able to receive the tellies?" Tim shot back at her. "He probably doesn't even know what's happened."

"Well, what did happen?" I asked, trying not to snap.

"One starship got back from Alpha Centauri," Danny said excitedly. "There are two inhabited Earth-type planets there!"

This was for me; this was it at last! I tried not to show my enthusiasm, though I knew that was futile. My relatives could keep their thoughts and emotions from me; I couldn't keep mine from them. "What kind of life inhabits them? Humanoid?"

"Uh-uh." Danny shook his head. "And hostile. The crew of the starship says they were attacked immediately on landing. When they turned and left, they were followed here by one of the alien ships. Must be a pretty advanced race to have spaceships. Anyhow, the extraterrestrial ship headed back as soon as it got a fix on where ours was going."

"But if they're hostile," I said thoughtfully, "it might mean war."

"Of course. That's why everybody's so wrought up. We hope it's peace, but we'll have to prepare for war just in case."

There hadn't been a war on Earth for well over a hundred years, but we hadn't been so foolish as to obliterate all knowledge of military techniques and weapons. The alien ship wouldn't be able to come back with reinforcements—if such were its intention—in less than six months. This meant time to get together a stockpile of weapons, though we had no idea of how effective our defenses would be against the aliens' armament.

They might have strange and terrible weapons against which we would be powerless. On the other hand, our side would have the benefits of telekinetically guided missiles, teleported saboteurs, telepaths to pick up the alien strategy, and prognosticators to determine the outcome of each battle and see whether it was worth fighting in the first place.

Everybody on Earth hoped for peace. Everybody, that is, except me. I had been unable to achieve any sense of identity with the world in which I lived, and it was almost worth the loss of personal survival to know that my own smug species could look silly against a still more talented race.

"It isn't so much our defense that worries me," my mother muttered, "as lack of adequate medical machinery. War is bound to mean casualties and there aren't enough cure-alls on the planet to take care of them. It's useless to expect the government to build more right now; they'll be too busy producing weapons. Sylvia, you'd better take a leave of absence from your job and come down to Psycho Center to learn first-aid techniques. And you too, Kevin," she added, obviously a little surprised herself at what she was saying. "Probably you'd be even better at it than Sylvia since you aren't sensitive to other people's pain."

I looked at her.

"It is an ill wind," she agreed, smiling wryly, "but don't let me catch you thinking that way, Kevin. Can't you see it would be better that there should be no war and you should remain useless?"

I couldn't see it, of course, and she knew that, with her wretched talent for stripping away my feeble attempts at privacy. Psi-powers usually included some ability to form a mental shield; being without one, I was necessarily devoid of the other.

My attitude didn't matter, though, because it was definitely war. The aliens came back with a fleet clearly bent on our annihilation—even the 'paths couldn't figure out their motives, for the thought pattern was entirely different from ours—and the war was on.

I had enjoyed learning first-aid; it was the first time I had ever worked with people as an equal. And I was good at it because psi-powers aren't much of an advantage there. Telekinesis maybe a little, but I was big enough to lift anybody without needing any superhuman abilities—normal human abilities, rather.

"Gee, Mr. Faraday," one of the other students breathed, "you're so strong. And without 'kinesis or anything."

I looked at her and liked what I saw. She was blonde and pretty. "My name's not Mr. Faraday," I said. "It's Kevin."

"My name's Lucy," she giggled.

No girl had ever giggled at me in that way before. Immediately I started to envision a beautiful future for the two of us, then flushed when I realized that she might be a telepath. But she was winding a tourniquet around the arm of another member of the class with apparent unconcern.

"Hey, quit that!" the windee yelled. "You're making it too tight! I'll be mortified!"

So Lucy was obviously not a telepath. Later I found out she was only a low-grade telesensitive—just a poetess—so I had nothing to worry about as far as having my thoughts read went. I was a little afraid of Sylvia's kidding me about my first romance, but, as it happened, she got interested in one of the guys who was taking the class with us, and she was not only too busy to be bothered with me, but in too vulnerable a position herself.

However, when the actual bombs—or their alien equivalent—struck near our town, I wasn't nearly so happy, especially after they started carrying the wounded into the Psycho Center, which had been turned into a hospital for the duration. I took one look at the gory scene—I had never seen anybody really injured before; few people had, as a matter of fact—and started for the door. But Mother was already blocking the way. It was easy to see from which side of the family Tim had got his talent for prognostication.

"If the telepaths who can pick up all the pain can stand this, Kevin," she said, "you certainly can." And there was no kindness at all in the you.

She gave me a shove toward the nearest stretcher. "Go on—now's your chance to show you're of some use in this world."

Gritting my teeth, I turned to the man on the stretcher. Something had pretty near torn half his face away. It was all there, but not in the right place, and it wasn't pretty. I turned away, caught my mother's eye, and then I didn't even dare to throw up. I looked at that smashed face again and all the first-aid lessons I'd had flew out of my head as if some super-psi had plucked them from me.

The man was bleeding terribly. I had never seen blood pouring out like that before. The first thing to do, I figured sickly, was mop it up. I wet a sponge and dabbed gingerly at the face, but my hands were shaking so hard that the sponge slipped and my fingers were on the raw gaping wound. I could feel the warm viscosity of the blood and nothing, not even my mother, could keep my meal down this time, I thought.

Mother had uttered a sound of exasperation as I dropped the sponge. I could hear her coming toward me. Then I heard her gasp. I looked at my patient and my mouth dropped open. For suddenly there was no wound, no wound at all—just a little blood and the fellow's face was whole again. Not even a scar.

"Wha—wha happened?" he asked. "It doesn't hurt any more!"

He touched his cheek and looked up at me with frightened eyes. And I was frightened, too—too frightened to be sick, too frightened to do anything but stare witlessly at him.

"Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.

I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.

But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.

"Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.

I felt ... well, good.

"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once. "The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it."

"Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously.

"Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?"

I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess."

She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers."

In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any