Subject: Super Scio Fiction - A SCI-FI STORY 1/1 - GROWING UP TELEPATHICALLY
Date: 21 Dec 1999 04:00:12
From: pilot@scientology.at (The Pilot)
Reply-To: pilot@hiddenplace.com
Organization: The Pilot's hidden place
Newsgroups: alt.clearing.technology

A SCI-FI NOVALLETTE 1/1 - GROWING UP TELEPATHICALLY

I've been negligent and distracted and the Holidays are
a nice time to take it easy and live life, so I don't
have a batch of posts ready yet.

So I thought I'd toss in one of my old Sci Fi stories
(I was trying to write Sci Fi back in the eighties) as
a bit of an XMAS present for you guys (at least those
of you who like Sci Fi).

Although its sort of off topic, it isn't entirely so
because my teenage experiences in Scientology heavily
influenced this story.

This little note is going to both ARS and ACT but the
story itself (a bit under 80K) is only going to ACT.
Look for it there if you like Sci Fi.

Merry Christmas,

The Pilot (aka Ken Ogger)

==========================

GROWING UP TELEPATHICALLY

Copyright c 1988, 1990 by Ken Ogger

In the vast halls of Washington, real people are those whom
you deal with personally.  Anyone else is just a statistic.
These statistics add up to "The People", a mythological
beast that has very little to do with individuals.

At the end of the twentieth century, the representatives of
"The People" became concerned with the Russian experiments
in telepathy.  Washington had been caught with its pants
down in 1957 when the Soviets launched the first orbital
satellite.  It had been a terrible blow to the party in
power.  They had refused to fund all that science fiction
nonsense and then the Russians had proved that it was real.
Even worse, the real glory of turning the situation around
belonged to their successors.  As did the incredible
expense of having to start up from nothing and get ahead.
And so there was a real fear that sooner or later the Red
team would make a breakthrough and start an ESP race that
could endanger many careers.

In this environment, Professor Emerus found fertile ground
for his theories.  He lobbied and promoted and wheeled and
dealed until the right ear perked up.  Soon, a not to be
named intelligence agency had set him up with a vast
research complex in Virginia and began the task of locating
the appropriate guinea pigs.  One of the selection criteria
was a maximum age of 12.

There is an old story of a boy raised by wolves.  When
found, he could not talk nor did any attempts to teach him
speech ever succeed.  The professor reasoned that if any
telepaths were born among us, they would be raised by
non-telepaths and the ability would atrophy.  To go
further, the whole race might already have evolved
significant psi abilities and yet be incapable of using
these talents because the skills were invalidated rather
than rewarded and exercised during childhood.  Many
poltergeist phenomena have been traced back to unhappy
small children.  When the children become "well adjusted",
they return to the norm and the abilities are lost forever.
In a nutshell, his theory was that we are cavemen who are
holding our children back.

Step one was a nationwide test for gifted fifth and sixth
graders.  The professor really wanted to get them even
younger but it did not seem likely that smaller children
could be wrested away from their parents.  And so he made
do with an age group in which many of the possible subjects
would already have been spoiled by the primitives raising
them.  But he could count on numbers to offset this.  He
would only need the top few hundred out of the millions
taking the tests.

The school told us that the tests were part of a new
program to locate young geniuses.  In fact, they did
include an intelligence test since the professor did not
want to bother with any morons, but the actual talents
tested for were the extra-sensory ones.

I remember the day when the government man came to call at
our apartment.  It was a few weeks before my last day in
grade school.  We had already picked out my next school and
I was both a little excited and a bit scared about the
coming year.  But the imminent summer vacation was the big
event in my life and September seemed very remote.

The agent had purposely set up the appointment for a time
when I was to be in school.  But my parents wanted me to
participate in any major decisions affecting my future.  Or
rather, they wanted me to sit quietly and give lip service
approval to their decisions on the matter so that I
wouldn't throw their dictates in their faces later.  Even
so, it was better to have a non-voting council seat than to
be the recipient of royal mandates.  As a result, I stayed
home for the visit.

It was one of those almost rainy days when the air is alive
with excitement and your eyes are drawn to the differences
in things.  I was sitting at the tiny green table we had
squeezed into the kitchen and staring down into the small
courtyard that separated the buildings.  There one scrawny
grey tree struggled to live amid the concrete.  I had
always thought it to be a sorry sight, but now in the new
morning air, it came to me that the struggle had made the
tree greater rather than less and I saw the vitality of its
leaves and trunk conquering against all odds.

Then the doorbell rang.  I ran out to see the polished
stranger in his fine blue suit introducing himself to my
parents.  I received one of those "what a big boy"
handshakes and then we settled into the dining room.

He painted a nice picture, sitting there having coffee with
us at the big brown table.  I was being given the once in a
lifetime opportunity to become one of the great men in the
world.  He told us of the terrible waste of talent,
geniuses poorly educated and unrecognized.  He told us of
Einstein flunking a moronically taught arithmetic course
and of Debussy being thrown out of the Paris Conservatory
of Music.  He never told us what the talents to be
developed were.  Possibly he did not know himself.  Instead
he led us to believe that there were potentially many
talents and that the student would develop whatever it was
that he was most gifted at.  The exact talents of a
candidate had to be kept secret.  It was common knowledge
that making too much of a child genius would spoil him and
stunt his development.

I had been pleasantly drinking all this in, basking there
in the warm sunlight that had started streaming in through
the window.  Indeed, a special school might be just the
thing to raise my status in the neighborhood and avoid the
monotony of the usual drab classrooms.  I could see my
mother was taken in too.  Her eyes were shining with "my
son the something or other" (exact value to be determined
later).  My father was quiet and reserved, but under the
surface he was just as caught up with the excitement as the
rest of us.

Then that oh so nice sounding man dropped his bombshell.  I
was to go away for six years.  I would not even come back
for the summers.  This was because the break in momentum
and the possible exposure to the invalidations of the
jealous teenagers around me might destroy the blooming
skills "as the touch of frost would stunt the orange
blossoms in their groves".

I caught my mother's eye, put on my most pleading look, and
shook my head "no".  At first I thought it would be all
right, because she took up sword and shield to defend me
and keep me in the nest.  But the gilded tongue continued
to wag against me.  I could only feel sick to my stomach as
he told tales of the apprentices of old and of how parents
would pay to ensure that their child had a good station in
life even though he must part from them to partake of it.
And when he gave his coup de grace "He will return to you
at eighteen, one of the leaders of civilization and already
a great man in your own lifetimes", I could see that the
battle was lost.  My mother would still resist and protest.
She might stall for days or even weeks.  But now it would
be a token resistance for the sake of her conscience and my
love.  I knew that her fighting heart was no longer in it,
for her pride was such that she would sacrifice anything to
have a son achieve world renown.

A pall hung over me that summer.  I looked on my friends as
people I would never see again.  Sure I'd be back someday.
But not as a child.  Both they and I would be different
people by that time and we wouldn't know each other.  And I
would lose all the places I loved.  The adult's and the
child's eye are not the same.  The me that was to comeback
would be too distant from the me that was now.  He might
look for bars and women whereas I looked for the silver
swings in the playground or the dark rocks in the park.  So
these too was I giving up forever.  And what of my toys?

I cried a lot that summer.

--------------

We were on the train to Washington.  Usually I like train
rides but this time I was in a state of shock.  I had
hardly noticed the scenery at all.  Now I was dimly staring
at the wads of yellow tissues that had somehow overflowed
from my mother's purse and found their way to the floor.
Mother had cried the whole way.  The government had offered
to pay airfare, but she was afraid to fly and even more
afraid to have me flying.  As a result, she had only taken
one plane trip in her life and I had never been on one.
This was ironic considering some of the training they had
planned for me, but we didn't know that at the time.

Another of the nice men met us at the station.  He seemed
to be stamped from the same mold as the first one with his
blue suit and black hair.  I wondered if they got them at a
discount.  I was becoming pretty cynical about these "nice"
men by this time.  None of them ever told us who they
really worked for or revealed anything of a specific
nature.  All we heard were vague generalities like the fact
that they belonged to an important but secret government
organization whose name could not be mentioned.

The agent stoically waited out the tearful embraces and
then steered my mother off to the next train back.  Then we
went out to the parking lot where a big black limo was
waiting for us.  The agent got in front with the driver and
I had the enormous back to flop around in.  Right away I
started with questions but he explained that it would
violate some secrets act or other for him to tell me
anything.  He did say that I could call him John, but the
implication was that this was just a label for the
afternoon rather than a true name.

By watching the signs, I eventually saw us come into Dulles
Airport.  John went out and started bringing kids back one
at a time.  The first one was a little eleven-year-old
redhead named Mary.  She acted proper and sophisticated,
shaking my hand and saying as to how she was pleased to
meet me.  Later, as we waited for John to bring back the
next victim, she called me over and whispered in my ear.
"Stop looking so nervous.  I'm scared shitless but I
wouldn't let them see it".

Next we met Billy, a black haired kid in a dungaree jacket.
He was big and tough and dominated the back seat from the
start.  Later when it got crowded, he made another kid sit
on the floor so he would have more room.  His first words
to us: "Hi freaks, I'll bet your talent is sitting around
looking like little ladies and gentlemen.  Or maybe a
special gift for ass kissing".  After that, he never shut up.

The agent had been bringing the kids in one at a time.  But
this policy was apparently just to avoid letting the
parents see any of the other youngsters because the next
arrival was a whole mob.  Stevie had flown in with his
parents, but Luke had flown alone, as had a pair of
identical twins named  Debbie and Lisa.  We had to pull
down the backwards facing seat to accommodate everyone.  I
liked Stevie right away.  He was a small waif with light
brown hair whose eyes glowed with wonderment at everything
around him.  It cheered me to see that someone was really
enjoying this.

After this, things became confused and I started losing
track. Jake and Eddie and Maxine and Rhonda and Fred and
Willie each came in one at a time.  We scrunched together
and gradually were packed in back there like sardines.
Billy liked the sardine analogy.  He kept making cracks
about "another fish for the can" and "come on you guys,
wiggle around some more, I know you can do it, your special
talent is squeezing into small places".

Finally the whole company was at hand.  The blackened
windows were raised and even our forward view was shut off
by a wall that came up to separate us from the driver.  Now
we squirmed around in a dark little box as they carried us
off to market.

----------------------

The institute was in a lovely glade by a lake.  They rolled
the windows down to let us see it as we drove the final
mile.  There was a small airstrip and a few large
buildings.  Then just trees and mountains in all directions.

We extracted ourselves from the sardine can and stood
breathing the crisp cool air.  The grass even smelled green
and we could hear birds in the trees.  I began to think
that maybe things would not be so bad after all.

Another pair of blue suits appeared and led us into the
main building.  It was a large three story colonial mansion
of red bricks and white columns.  Once inside, we were
hustled down a dim corridor and I could see little as my
eyes adjusted from the bright sunlight.

Finally we were ushered into a small auditorium.  It was a
low ceilinged room with recessed lights and tan fold down
seats.  There we were presented to our tormentor.  At first
we were fooled.  He didn't fit the stereotype.  With his
tweed suit and graying hair, he was more apt to be a school
teacher than a mad scientist.  But mad scientist he was as
we would soon discover.

The professor mounted the podium and stood there adjusting
his tie as we milled around and found our seats.  We all
sat in the first row except for Billy who went to the back.
I wound up between the little black boy named Willie and
the blond haired twins in their identical yellow dresses.
The girls seemed too cheerful and sophisticated so I turned
to Willie who appeared to share my mood.

"This place scares me" I whispered.

He nodded.  "There's no where to go if we don't like the
action.  Its just a bigger sardine can".

I turned around and looked towards Billy.  He had draped
his legs over the next row forward and opened some buttons
on his blue denim shirt.  He was settled back with a casual
disinterested air.  The professor took exception to this.

"You might hear better up front".  The professor's voice
was deep and clear.

Billy shook his head.  "This'll do me just fine".

Emerus leaned on the podium.  "I don't really care where
you sit.  This isn't a disciplinary school.  In fact, here
you will have more freedoms than a child would ever dream
of.  But when it comes to the experiment itself, I must
have absolute obedience.  Now, the next time we meet like
this, you can drape yourself over the chairs or go lie on
the floor or do whatever you like.  But right now, I feel
that you are trying to make a point about not following my
orders.  So this one time, I ask you to take a seat up
front.  Will you do so?".

Billy smirked.  "I like it here".

The professor shrugged and pressed a button on the podium.
Two big guys came in.  They were tough looking bruisers in
ill-fitting business suits.  I think that I could have seen
them last week on Saturday night wrestling.  The mad doctor
nodded in Billy's direction and said "move him to the front
row".

They moved with an unbroken steadiness that made you feel
that even a brick wall would not make them falter.  As they
approached, Billy hopped up and said "Ok, I give.  I'm
coming up front".  But the goons didn't seem to notice.
They picked him up by his arms and deposited him in a front
row seat.  The professor said a "thank you" and they were gone.

"Now I want to welcome you to one of the noblest
experiments that has ever been undertaken.  You and the
other groups here are all being given the chance to break
the chains of the primitive society around you and unleash
the true powers of the mind.  You are all explorers in a
new world and together we will discover what the human
psyche can really achieve."

He went on like this for quite awhile.  I must have been
dense because I still kept thinking that the powers he was
talking about were intellectual ones like becoming super
smart or something.  Even when he explained about the kid
raised by wolves, I thought he meant that dumb parents kept
their kids dumb.  As a result, the next part of the lecture
gave me a quite a shock.

"And now some basic definitions just so we agree on what
we're talking about.  Many of these terms have a number of
different meanings.  Take the term clairvoyance for
example.  It has been used to cover many talents but here
we will limit its use to prediction of the future by seeing
a picture of an event that has not yet happened.  For the
skill of simply knowing of a future event we will use the
word precognition.  The other talent often lumped together
with this is the ability to see or to know about events in
the present that one cannot see by ordinary means.  We will
refer to this as remote perception.

"Of course you know of telepathy, but let us distinguish
between verbal telepathy where a conversation is exchanged,
and mind reading where the contents of someone's mind is
probed by another.  We will restrict the term levitation to
lifting one's own body and use psychokinesis or pk to refer
to moving or lifting objects or even just influencing them
as in affecting the roll of dice.

"Lacking a better term, we will use pyrokinetics to refer
not only to the firestarter ability but also to any sort of
kinetic energy control such as manipulating electrical
discharges.

"And finally, we come to that impossible sounding ability,
teleportation.  This refers to the shifting of the location
of an object or of one's body without moving it through the
intervening space".

I was stunned.  By the expressions around me, so was
everyone else except for the twins.  They were sitting
there smiling and nodding like they heard this stuff all
the time.

"Now you might well ask, how are we to achieve these
abilities that have so eluded mankind.  Well first of all,
you are all already gifted in these areas.  Do you remember
the mechanical aptitude tests that you all did?  There were
things like that scale you had to balance.  But what you
didn't know was that the arms of the scales we sent around
were hollow and each contained a tiny ball bearing.  It was
not possible to balance that scale and yet many of you did.
Or consider the word problems in the written portion of
the test.  All the multiple choice answers were equally
valid.  But yet some of you knew which answers were going
to be marked correct.  The list goes on and on.  You are
the cream of the crop."

Now I knew a mistake had been made.  Maybe some of these
kids were psychics or espers or whatever you called them,
but not me.  With that crazy test, lots of people would
just score high by luck.  I was no statistics wiz, but I
knew that if you have enough monkeys, one of them will
write Shakespeare and that doesn't make him a literary
genius.  The guy had a pet theory and was deluding himself
into thinking that we fit into it.  I wanted to go home,
but I remembered those big bruisers that he'd called in.

"You will be practicing and drilling these talents in
various ways.  There are many things we are going to try.
For example, it may be that strong emotion, or eastern
meditation, or threats to survival may enhance these
abilities.  Or perhaps just sitting and trying to lift
something for hours on end until you build up the right
sort of psi muscle.  You are the 14th of 20 groups that are
arriving this month.  The groups will try different things
and we'll be testing each group weekly to see which methods
are the most rewarding.  Also, we're going to raise you as
if you were growing up in a telepathic society".

Finally he summed things up and we were lead off to our
quarters.  That turned out to be the next major shock.

---------------

"But why do we have to sleep with the boys?".

"I always had my own room".

"You know something, this really shits!".

"Hey come on, it might be a lot of fun".

"Where am I gonna put all my stuff?".

Everyone was speaking at once.  We had just been taken into
our room.  Just one room.  Just eight beds.  Not even a
door on the john.  The drab olive colored blankets made me
think of an army barracks.  I didn't like it one bit.

"The professor will explain everything".  This from the
assistant that we later came to call Boris.  Not his real
name of course, but better than being called Igor which is
how we named his partner.

Finally his eminence came in and the room grew silent.

"In a telepathic society, everyone would be able to see
into each other's minds and nothing would be hidden.  For
example, from the youngest age, children would mindshare
their parents making love.  There could be no shame or modesty.

"The barriers we build to hide from each other, especially
the sexually related ones that develop during puberty, may
permanently inhibit the development of the telepathic
talent.  Even when these inhibitions are relieved in later
life, the early scars in the subconscious may keep people
withdrawn from each other.  How many adults could bear up
to allowing someone else to read his innermost secrets?

"So here you will have no secrets from each other.  You
will live together as one and share your deeper selves.
The physical circumstances around you are only a surface
condition to help you get started.  You must give of
yourselves to each other.

"Since there are more boys than girls, we will assign a bed
to each boy and the girls will rotate between them in a
strict order.  In this way, you will all share the changes
of puberty together and pass beyond the stupid social
barriers of our society.

"For a similar reason, we have removed the door from the
rest room and used clear glass in the shower.  You will be
freed from hiding your natural bodily functions from each
other.  I ask you to indulge in nakedness and to discard
all your primitive inhibitions.  Now I will give you a
chance to get settled in."

I didn't pee for a week.  At least not in that open
lavatory when anyone was still awake.  I'd lie there
holding it until late at night, or I'd go while we were in
class.  There were normal facilities near the classrooms.
There had to be because all the groups were not as
uninhibited as we were.

What we'd been told was not some basic truth but just one
of many theories.  Some groups went to the other extreme.
Here the professor told them "Telepaths are highly
sensitive.  They would never read another mind without
permission.  They jealously guard their own and others
privacy".  Those kids got their own rooms.  Other groups
were somewhere in between with enough beds and a bathroom
door or even two separate dormitories.

Eventually it just got too painful and Billy was beginning
to notice and tease me.  Also, I was feeling less inhibited
around some of the girls who I'd talked with when we were
sharing a bed together.  So I decided to get over it.  It
was rough.  Sometimes I'd go into that ugly white lavatory
and simply freeze up.  I'd stand there and start counting
the floor tiles in an effort to relax.  Then Billy and
Maxine would start in on me.  They'd tease or stand beside
me and stare and one time Billy pushed me aside and said
"I'll show you how it's done" and relieved himself while
Maxine applauded.

Most of the other kids just ignored all this and did their
stuff mechanically until we got used to each other.  The
only other one who was so uptight that he really got teased
was Willie.  He was even more timid than I was and I always
wanted to befriend him on account of that.  But I was
afraid that I'd get harassed even further so I stayed
distant.  Later I regretted it.  If he'd had a real friend,
things might have turned out differently for him.

Billy did try to harass Mary once.  He was really showing
off for Jake and Luke, who were fast turning into his pets,
but he picked the wrong victim.  She really put her foot
down.  "If you don't go away and let me take a crap in
peace, I'll save it up and do it in your bed the next time
I'm stuck with you."

Another problem was the nightly bed sharing.  Most of us
just kept our backs to each other and it didn't turn out to
be a big deal.  That is except for Maxine.  The first time
with her she kept grabbing at me and I didn't get any sleep
all night.  But then she found that she could play when she
was with Billy or Jake and left the rest of us alone while
she caught up on her sleep.

Also during the first week there was always a nightly fight
between Billy and his current partner.  It stopped the
night he was with Lisa.  Her twin got up and banged a chair
on his head.

In the third week all this garbage stopped.  We were facing
bigger problems and nobody had anything left for trivial
things like modesty.  We were all fighting desperately to
hang onto our sanity.  Even Mary cracked one day and spent
the whole night crying in my arms.  It was pretty grim.

During our first two weeks, we'd spent the whole time in
class studying the history of everything from esp to
witchcraft.  But starting in the third week, the Marquis de
Sade, which was our new name for the professor, wanted to
find out if one or another method of meditation would help
the cause.

We got stuck with a bad variation.  For two weeks we sat
around for twelve hours a day chanting "I am nothing".
Some of us, like myself, just felt a little weird and got
bored.  Eddie even said that he'd gotten enlightened.  He
started saying things like "To be or not to be is not the
question but the answer".  He said that to us over lunch
one day in the big dining room.

Billy came back with "That's stupid.  Those green beans on
your plate are just as good an answer.  Why don't you stuff
them in your face and shut up".

Although the chanting annoyed Billy and made him act twice
as nasty, it didn't really freak him out.  Some of the
others were not so lucky.  Stevie started hiding under the
bed when we were in our room, Fred was seeing things, and
Rhonda took to crying and saying "it isn't true" over and
over.  The one hardest hit was Willie.  He already had a
low opinion of himself and the chanting was the last straw.
One day he got up, announced "They're right, I'm just an
ant under Gods foot", pulled off his clothes, and ran off
into the woods screaming "Strike me dead now".

The next day they came and took his bed away.  We didn't
have to go to the practice room and were pretty much left
alone.  I got a book out of the library and lay in bed
reading all day.  Some of the others went out into the
parking lot and played handball.  In the afternoon, Billy
got up and tried to masturbate in the middle of the room.
He thought it would make a great show, but by this time we
were so used to each other that nobody paid attention.  Let
him do what he wants.  What do we care.  Anyway, the
attempt failed.  He wasn't old enough to do it yet.

While we relaxed, Emerus was studying his graphs and
selecting another meditation school for us to use.  We
wound up getting his favorite.  A style of external
visualization that lined up nicely with his theories of
projective telepathy.  After we did this for two weeks full
time, it was worked into the general curriculum for all the
groups and became a regular Wednesday afternoon session
regardless of whatever else we were working on.

We would sit on the floor of the cedar panelled meditation
room.  Thankfully, it had a plush brown carpet and they
didn't force us to use the lotus position.  Usually Igor
ran the session, smirking his crooked smile the entire
time.  Often one of the blue coats would be there as well.
They'd play cards quietly in the back once we got started.
I can still hear the cold slap and shuffle of that deck.

They would begin by passing around something like a rose or
a branch from a tree.  We would each hold and study it for
a few minutes.  Then they would take it away and we would
spend the next few hours trying to visualize it in front of
us.  I didn't have much success with the rose and got tired
of it fast.  So I started imagining the train set I used to
have.  As the days went by, I worked on every little wheel
and piece of track.  Gradually I achieved color and the
feeling of solidity in the image.  Then I began improving
it, putting grass between the tracks and stone gravel under
the ties until it was my own unique mixture of fantasy and
reality.  With this I came to my own sort of enlightenment.
You can visualize something just as good as reality all by
yourself.  So what's the difference?  It's only in whether
others are sharing the illusion with you.

But everything didn't go so well.  The Marquis got the idea
that threats or danger might be needed to break through the
barrier to the pk talents.  We were pitted against other
groups.  Each side would get a color, red or black, and a
roulette wheel would be spun.  We'd stand around it and
wish and strain and try to project at it.  Whichever team
lost the spin was thrown naked into the showers by the gym
with the water set to ice cold.  Then we'd spin again.  It
would go on for hours and hours.  Debbie caught a bad cold
and finally got excused on the fourth day.  The rest of us
were stuck with it for a whole week before the professor
decided that the results were still random.

Then there were the sessions to get us ready for
levitation.  A parachute training tower was erected outside
and we went through the equivalent of jump school.  They
brought in some sort of special plane of the sort that they
used for astronaut training and took us up for free fall
experiences.  I always threw up in the closed cabin when we
went into the dive.  Finally we went sky diving.  If we'd
had any sense it would have been a good time to try and
escape, but we were all too scared during the dive.  We
only did it once and then the program was cancelled because
Luke broke an arm, Rhonda broke a leg, and other teams had
similar problems.  We were too small and inexperienced and
the terrain in the area was rough.  Someone had neglected
to tell the professor that you trained paratroopers in flat
places like the desert and not in the mountains.

About this time our interpersonal relationships got
complicated again.  One by one we were passing over the
hump of puberty and becoming sexually capable.  Billy and
Maxine were the first, probably because they were always
fondling each other.  Once he finally did it with her, he
wanted to do all the other girls and the nightly fights
were on again.  Finally Mary gave him a hard kick in the
groin and he settled down.

Meanwhile, Maxine started testing each of us every few
weeks.  Some like Luke were frustrated and upset until it
finally happened and then went at it with a vengeance at
every opportunity.  Others like myself wanted to be left
alone, but sooner or later she got all of us one way or
another.

One night I woke up shaking and feeling the strangest
sensations.  First I thought I was having some sort of
nervous system attack or other.  Then I realized that
Maxine's hand was around me and I was all wet and sticky.
I got real mad.  I was upset that my body could do that all
out of my control.  I threw her out of the bed.  She just
laughed at me and made fun.

All the next week she made cracks about how I really wanted
to do it with boys instead of girls and should start
wearing a dress.  However the twins took pity on me.  They
were always thoughful and sensitive.  In fact, they were
the nearest things we had to true telepaths.  They had
always anticipated each other's thoughts.  Not real
telepathy but sometimes they would both say the same thing
at once or just sort of know what was happening to each
other when they were separated.  They worked very hard at
trying to reach the rest of us the same way.

One day they called me aside and told me that either of
them would do it with me when I was ready.  They said that
it would be a warm exciting way of sharing each other and
I'd like it a lot.  I should just let them know when I felt
like it.  Meanwhile I shouldn't worry about it anymore.  So
I did stop worrying, and people stopped bothering me about
it, and eventually I did start doing it with each of them,
and they were right, I liked it a lot.

But it was Mary that I was really attracted to.  We'd lie
there all night talking whenever it was our turn together.
She had decided to remain a virgin and I was quite
supportive on account of my own bad time with being pushed
too fast by Maxine.  So I was quite a little gentleman and
oh so careful not to touch her anywhere delicate either in
bed or out of it.  She must have wondered why I was so cold
when we were such good friends.  Listening to how I carried
on when I was with either of the twins, she could only
believe that I found her physically distasteful.

I was such a fool.  I regretted it for years.  All she
wanted was someone who would be loving and considerate.
And eventually someone came along who fit the bill and it
was too late for me.

---------------------

It was towards the end of the second year that we had our
big breakthrough on psychokinesis.  Our latest gig was to
sit around in a circle holding hands and chanting "go up"
at a glass ball.  Like everything else, we did this on and
on for weeks.  Eventually we decided that this was another
dead end.  Even the professor had reached that conclusion,
but he was a fanatic about thoroughness and would keep us
working with a technique long past any hope of getting results.

It was a beautiful afternoon, following in the wake of a
summer heat wave.  The air was cool and pleasant with the
hint of approaching autumn.  But our schedule only gave us
half an hour of recreation time.  It wasn't nearly enough.

The gloom was palpable as we filed indoors for our
afternoon practice session.  We shuffled deep into the
heart of the building to one of the interior rooms that
were considered to be less distracting for this sort of
exercise.  The windowless room became like a coffin as the
door slammed shut behind us.  The dark walls pressed down
with a claustrophobic weight.

But we were in luck.  Boris was on vacation and Igor had
gone into town for the afternoon.  So they had sent in one
of the blue suits to run the class.  Debbie went to work on
him, gushing sweetness and yearning with deep brown puppy
dog eyes.

"We'll be sooo good.  You wouldn't even have to watch us.
Nobody will get up for anything.  We'll all promise".

Then Billy cinched the matter by raising his right hand and
swearing that there would be no trouble.  His reputation
even extended to the staff.  We exchanged grins as the
instructor gave in and led us from the room.  For once, we
were working well together as a team.  That shared
camaraderie must have played some part in what was to follow.

I experienced an unusual sensation as we walked through the
hallways and in some strange way, I knew the others were
feeling it as well.  With each step, the walls seemed to be
falling away behind us and our own space was expanding.
The feeling grew all the way down that corridor until
finally we burst forth into the light.  There our
consciousness winged outward to encompass the hills and the
distant mountains behind them.  It was startlingly clear
and beautiful.  I felt as if I could reach out and touch
every one of the far trees and feel the coolness of their
leaves.

The feeling remained as we formed our circle and began the
chant.  Even the white puffs of cloud that drifted in the
magical blueness above us seemed within reach.

Now there was no care for the passage of the hours.  A
warmth flowed between us that transcended any
considerations of time or fatigue.  No cantankerous thought
troubled the stillness of our reverie.  I was content
simply to be there with the others, feeling Lisa's simple
joy through her small hand on my right and Eddie's peaceful
contentment on my left.  Beyond them I felt something of
all the rest in the unbroken chain that stretched before
me.  Dimly, I even sensed the instructor while he sat there
behind us and I knew when he finally grew bored and went
inside.

As the time passed, our sphere began to grow ever more
beautiful in our eyes.  Gradually I came to realize that it
held a faint amber tint that I had never noticed before.  I
looked closer and the color was not amber but gold.  It
seemed strange that I had missed seeing this earlier.  I
wondered if it was really the same crystal that we had been
using all week, or whether they had given us a different
one for today.  That was when it began to twitch.

I felt a surge of what was almost electricity pass around
the circle.  The ball teetered and then rolled an inch.  My
mind was frozen with wonderment but still we continued the
chant.  The crystal twitched again and then pulled back to
its former position.  I could see it trembling.  I started
thinking "We're really doing it" over and over and then,
with a final convulsion, it glided up into the air.  It
rose three feet, smooth as can be, and then just hung
there, quiet and stable.

We were awestruck.  That is, all of us except for Freddy.
He started moaning and shaking as our chant ground to a
halt.  Then he began screaming and pulling back.  When he
managed to break free of the hands gripping his, the sphere
fell to the ground and shattered.

Billy jumped up and started screaming at him.  "You dumb
freak!  You ruined it.  We had the power in our hands.  You
crap".

Then Billy was hitting and kicking him, arms and legs
flailing about in a windmill of rage.  I stared for a
minute and then got up to stop it.  Luke pushed me back
down and told me to stay out of it.  He and Jake had taken
to following Billy around and now I saw that they were a
real team.  I looked around and everyone else was just
sitting there except for Mary who was running into the
building.

She came back in a minute with the goon squad and they
pulled Billy off and got Freddy to the infirmary.

The end result was that they took away another bed, and all
the groups started doing a "go up" session once a week.  We
kept trying the drill but it didn't work again.  Our group
was now polarized with Billy, Jake, Luke, and Maxine on one
side and the remaining seven of us on the other.  We never
got back to that strange moment of harmony that carried the
crystal ball up into the air.  Even worse, Billy and his
crew really started pushing the rest of us around.  We
outnumbered them, but Stevie was small, Eddie wouldn't lift
a hand against anyone since his enlightenment, and the rest
were girls.

Shortly after that, another group made a breakthrough on
levitation.  The drill was to lie on the floor and try and
make parts of your body light and float up in the air.
Part of the theory was that you were already moving your
body around so it should be easier than moving some dead
object.  During one of these sessions a girl had actually
drifted up into the air without realizing it.  She'd gone
into some sort of trance and started dreaming of flying.
When someone touched her, she woke up and dropped to the
floor.  So we had the drill added to our weekly schedule.
But just like our breakthrough, it was a freak one time
occurrence.

As the months went by, the professor grew more and more
frantic about this levitation business.  It had happened
just often enough to whet his appetite for fame and
recognition, but he still lacked anything that could be
demonstrated.

Since we all kept coming up dry, he finally devised a new
means of torture for us.  He got a huge blue airbag of the
sort that are used in movie stunts and placed it below the
parachuting tower.  One of the experimental groups would
stand around the bag chanting "go up" for about an hour.
At the same time, the victim would be up at the top lying
on a sort of hinged diving board practicing the body
lifting meditation.  When the time came, one of the
attendants would pull a lever and the board would drop
away.  Then the victim would be falling and the group would
try to stop them in mid air.

It didn't work.  Also, falling fifty feet backwards is a
good way to develop a healthy fear of heights.  That's the
last thing that you need if you are going to levitate.
When my turn came, Billy and his friends changed their
chant to "fall and break your ass".  It didn't seem to make
a difference.

This is where we lost Rhonda.  She was a quiet and pleasant
little black girl who had meekly done everything she was
told.  But when they threw her off that tower she turned
into a tiger.  She wouldn't talk to anyone all day after
the jump.  At dinner, while Emerus was walking past our
table, she broke a glass and went after him with the jagged
edge.  She actually slashed the side of his face before
they dragged her away.  We cheered.  She was the only one
who ever paid him back for all the agony.  We were sorry to
see her go but she disappeared to wherever they were taking
the dropouts.

Up till now our numbers had only shrunk slowly.  But the
professor's next bright idea wiped out two whole groups.
The one survivor was moved in with us.

The scheme had to do with sensory deprivation tanks.  We
all received some short doses.  A few hours can be quite
pleasant.  But our master had his heart set on a marathon
session.  So 20 kids went under with intravenous rigs and
all sorts of life support and were left there for two weeks.

A few of them came out completely mad.  The rest were so
far gone that the whole crew was shipped off into limbo.
Except, of course, for Larry.  He was just fine.  In fact,
he was more than fine because while he was in the tank, he
had developed remote perception.

Writing about the tanks, a researcher once said that the
mind can develop a complete analog of the physical universe
and perceive it as if it were real.  But if the illusion
duplicates reality, then it is reality.  Larry had looked
at the real world from inside that tank.  And the talent
stayed with him.

I liked him from the start.  He was a quiet but friendly
kid with sandy hair and hazel eyes.  He tried hard to like
everybody, even Billy's crowd.  He always seemed to have
time to listen to your troubles and never offered a word of
criticism.  Even when I started to burn up with jealousy, I
couldn't really hate him for it.  It just hurt to watch him
and Mary together.  I didn't know what to do about it
except to simply wall myself off mentally.  But I missed
the late night talks with her.

I guess it started because he didn't know about Mary's
policy on sex.  So naturally, given his sympathetic nature,
he was warm and tender with her on their nights together,
not pushing anything but not holding back either.  It did
not take many such nights before she began to respond.  The
next thing I knew, they were star-crossed lovers devoted to
each other.

We started helping them cheat so that they could always
sleep together.  Even Maxine was touched and went along
with the nightly trade to get them together after lights
out.  Billy didn't like it much but the twins started doing
it with him when they traded for Mary's spot.  Since they'd
been saying no to him ever since he beat up Freddy, he
stayed content with this, at least for a while.

We found out about Larry's talent fairly quickly.
Sometimes we'd amuse ourselves by making him lie on his
bunk with his eyes closed and tell us who was walking by in
the corridor outside.  His accuracy was phenomenal.  On
account of this, we thought that he must be scoring
fantastically on reading the cards during the weekly psi
tests.  But he told us differently.

"I need to close my eyes and relax for a few minutes to
bring a scene in focus.  Especially with those cards.
They're thin and small and much harder than just looking at
the trees outside.  Anyway, why should I give that crazy
man any satisfaction?"

That's how we found out that our room was bugged.  Because,
the following weekend, the card reading part of the test
was changed.  We sat there for about fifteen minutes on
each of four cards instead of going through a whole deck
quickly.  It didn't do them much good because Larry would
spend the time looking through the wall or outside or
anywhere else but where he was supposed to.

----------------------

Things carried on as usual through the end of the third
year.  We kept trying various drills and meditation
exercises.  If something produced a startling result or
caused a group's graphs to soar upward on the weekly
testing, it became part of our regular regimen.  These
regular sessions were short and we were used to them.  So
we looked on them as a source of blessed relief from the
intense strain of checking out the professor's wild theories.

Gradually the laboratory complex was becoming less
populated.  A number of other groups washed out completely
and every group had lost members.  Initially there had been
four meal shifts and now they were combined into two.

Occasionally we got breaks from the freaky experiments by
spending a week or two in class.  You have never seen
children so happy and thankful to be in school.  The
classrooms even had windows.

Once we spent an entire month learning anatomy.  We even
watched the instructor dissect a corpse without a single
protest except for a girl in one of the other groups who
threw up.  This was all in preparation for some exercises
where we tried to extend our awareness down through our
bodies and take over the automatic functions.  Most of the
students had only marginal success at this, but a few,
including myself, developed a slight degree of control over
our heartbeats.  This was good enough to get the drill
added to our standard schedule.

In spite of the lack of presents, we always looked forward
to Christmas.  We'd decorate the trees they put up in the
assembly and dining rooms and we'd get a few days off to
run around and play.  But our fourth Christmas was like the
calm before the storm.  After that everything went to hell
real fast.

While we were taking it easy, the professor's minions had
been hard at work.  They had taken two of the practice
rooms and combined them into a large laboratory.  It was
the first morning after New Years when Boris conducted us
there for a preliminary briefing.

The room was already crowded.  There were at least three
other groups there along with a goodly percentage of the
staff.  I strained to see around all the bodies and caught
sight of a huge electrical coil, a towering mass of
gleaming copper, fully seven feet high.

Stevie jogged my elbow.  "The professor is showing his true
colors.  It's a regular mad scientist's lair".

I heard Billy laughing and saying something about "crack,
sizzle, and pop" when the professor raised his voice above
the din and told us to sit down.  We arranged ourselves
cross legged on the floor in a space that had been cleared
between the various pieces of apparatus.  The professor
stood by the enormous coil and patted it affectionately.

"Nikola Tesla, the man who gave us alternating current,
would put on demonstrations of safe electricity using coils
like this one.  He did it to counter the shows being given
by Edison about the dangers of being electrocuted with AC.
In those days, Edison and General Electric, holding patents
for DC, were battling against  Westinghouse which was
backing Tesla's inventions.  They even went so far as to
electrocute animals and refer to the process as being
"Westinghoused".

"To counter this, Tesla devised these coils which could
produce current at fantastically high frequencies;
Frequencies so great that they would float on the surface
of the skin without endangering the human body.  Let me
demonstrate".

He turned from us and threw a huge knife switch.  There was
a loud hum and the stink of ozone filled the air.  Then
began the most amazing demonstration of human conductance.
He made light bulbs glow in his hands, he threw lighning
bolts at a metal sphere, and he even formed us up into
human chains of living conductors.  We all took turns going
through this last exercise with one of us holding a light
bulb, another grasping an electrode, and a few of us
linking hands between them to form a path for the current.
When it was Billy's turn, he screamed and pretended that he
was being electrocuted.  Jake found this very upsetting and
tried to leave but a guard turned him back at the door.
Billy was very entertained by this and kept making sizzling
sounds and miming convulsions throughout the professors
closing speech.

"Everything you have seen here today is ordinary textbook
science.  Once we allow for the special properties of ultra
high frequency currents, they can be shown to follow
predictable paths.  But just think what we could do if the
mind could gain control over these electrical flows.  The
brain itself already functions in an electrical context.
It should not be a difficult step to extend this to the
manipulation of a charge floating on the surface of the body".

In the weeks that followed, we tried lots of things to
manipulate the current flow.  For example, we'd sit on a
plate connected to the coil and hold two lightbulbs.  They
would both illuminate under normal circumstances.  Then
we'd try to divert the flow so that only one bulb went on.
The double bulbs were used to prevent a backlash by making
sure that there was always some safe destination for the
energy.  Even so, someone in another group got fried.

Of course this was supposed to be impossible because of the
high frequency.  But if you're going to push your mind into
an electrical wave, frequency is easier to change than the
natural resistance path that the wave is flowing on.  The
whole charge of the coil hit the kid's heart.  Luckily, it
was only a microsecond jolt and the instructor knew enough
CPR to avert a fatality.  After that, they always kept the
nurse close by during the energy exercises.

But there were successes as well as disasters.  Stevie was
one of the major ones.  He could hold an electrode, point
his hand at different things across the room, and make a
spark jump where ever he wanted.

It was the electricity that freaked out Lisa.  She was
working with a spark gap generator.  The device consisted
of two large metal spheres.  They would hum and crackle and
then a giant spark would jump between them.  This would
happen  every five seconds.  The timing was quite precise.
The drill was to try and alter the delay between the arcs.
Supposedly, this could be done by  increasing or decreasing
the resistance in the air between the poles or by affecting
the current itself in some way.  She did something with her
mind and the spark jumped at her instead of across to the
other sphere.

Her forehead was blackened and her eyebrows singed.  But
the scary part was that she couldn't see.  It was Debbie
who screamed at the moment of impact.  Lisa just crumpled
to the floor.  So we made a bad start and ran over to
Debbie's side of the room.  She was sort of stunned and
didn't even know what happened.  She'd felt something hit
her but there was nothing there.  Then we looked around and
saw Lisa on the floor.

They came and loaded her onto a gurney.  We trotted along
behind the cart and then raced up the stairs while they
used the small elevator.  But when they rolled her through
the big blue doors into the infirmary, they slammed it in
our faces.  They wouldn't even let Debbie go in with her.
But we all camped outside the locked door and waited for
developments.

This is when we learned that Eddie was becoming a precog.
He'd told me that morning that something bad was going to
happen.  I'd pressed him for details but he'd said that the
future wasn't really predetermined.  He was just feeling
some current vibrations that were headed down a hurtful
path.  He wasn't good enough to resolve it into an actual
picture of what might happen.

Now I asked again and he said that the badness was still
building up.  We thought that meant that Lisa might die
from the shock.  How wrong we were.

We sat there for hours, leaning back against the bare grey
walls and worrying.  Debbie kept trying to reach her
mentally but she said that they had her sedated and she
couldn't really get anything.  But finally she got through.

"They've woken her up and a doctor's looking at her eyes.
He thinks they'll recover in a few weeks."

We all grinned and hugged her.  A few minutes later an
attendant came out and confirmed the report and told us to
go back to our rooms.  So we all headed back downstairs.

Of course Billy and his friends hadn't participated in our
vigil.  But he did refrain from making the usual sarcastic
cracks.  He greeted our news with "I'm glad to hear that
the kid's alright".

Mary went off to the kitchen to see if she could get us
something.  We had missed dinner while we were sitting
upstairs.

Then Debbie hopped up from the bed where she'd been resting.

"They're taking her away.  They think she's had too big a
shock.  They're washing her out of the experiment.  They
can't do that.  We'll be separated.  We've got to stop them."

She ran out of the room.  I got up and followed.  So did
Eddie, Steve, and Larry.  I looked at them.

"Shouldn't we just let her go?  Lisa's getting out and with
this maybe they'll let Debbie out too.  Wouldn't they be
better off that way?"

But here Eddie's damn precognition screwed things up.

"It feels like the bad thing is just about to happen."

So we figured that there was something dangerous in the
situation or in Lisa's being moved and we ran out to the
garage after Debbie.

It was a dim ugly place stinking of gasoline and holding
about a dozen vehicles in its concrete embrace.  There
wasn't much that we could do there.  Debbie was yelling and
banging at the small private ambulance that they used for
these situations.  The attendants were trying to calm her
down and offering her some pills which she wouldn't take.
Stevie put his arm around her and let her cry on his
shoulder.  Then Eddie turned pale.

"It's not here.  It's back in our room".

I got a sinking feeling in my stomach.  "Where's Mary?".

We started running back.  Even Debbie followed after a last
lingering look at the blue and white ambulance.  We ran
into Maxine in the hall.

"Don't look at me.  I didn't have anything to do with it.
Maybe she could get away with that holier-than-thou stuff
when she was saying no to everyone.  But it's too much to
expect Billy to put up with her giving it to Larry and not
to him."

When we came through the door it was as bad as I could've
imagined.  He was on her pounding away while Luke and Jake
held her arms and legs.  She was cursing and struggling and
it only made them laugh.

I was in mid-air flying at Jake.  Larry was all over Billy
in the same instant.  Then I was on the floor and Jake was
laughing and kicking at me.  I was surprised to see Eddie
jump him, but it didn't do much good.  Jake just whirled
him around and threw him at a wall.  It did give me enough
time to stagger up only to be felled again by a solid right
to the stomach.

Billy was up and pounding Larry's face to a pulp.  Debbie
tried to smash a chair over his head but he turned and gave
her a good belt in the jaw.

It was Stevie who saved us all.  He'd fearfully stepped
toward Luke.  Luke joked and taunted and made boxing
motions.  Then he stepped in toward Stevie and launched a
heavy left hook.  The lights flickered and a spark jumped
out of the wall socket.  Luke went down like a rock.

Stevie looked at Jake and raised his arm.  The tough guy
ran out of that room as fast as I've ever seen anybody
move.  Then we all jumped Billy.  With five of us, it was
easy.  Soon we had him trussed up and hanging upside down
from the door track of the shower.

Larry was holding Mary in his arms.  She wasn't crying.
Just trembling and making a fist over and over again.
There was a repetitive mixture of "Its alright now, its
over" and "I'll kill the bastard" coming from the two of them.

The others were talking loudly.

Stevie: "I don't know how I did it.  I was bluffing the
second time.  I was so scared".

Eddie: "Sometimes the needs of friends are senior to the
needs of philosophy".

Billy: "It was just a joke for Christsake.  I wouldn't do
it again.  Please just let me down."

Gradually everyone quieted down.  I looked at Billy and he
shut up too.  I motioned everyone back into the bedroom and
over to Luke.  He was breathing but still out.  He had a
big burn mark on his hand and arm where the bolt had
struck.  I signalled for silence and began talking.

"Looks like Luke has been electrocuted.  He's dead.  Now
we're murderers and it really wouldn't make any difference
what we do to Billy."

The others caught my lead and began making similar remarks.
Plans to do him in and then go hide the bodies.  Finally
Mary spoke up.

"I think we should cut it off and leave him hanging up
there bleeding to death".

So we went back and opened his pants and Mary wrapped a
glass in a towel and smashed it against the sink.  It was
when she waved a sharp piece in front of his eyes that we
learned that he'd been building up a bit of a pk talent.
Mary's hand began waving around.

"I can feel him pulling at the glass."

So I hit him in the head and then Mary quickly reached up
and gave him something to remember us by.  It was just a
small cut, hardly more than a nick.  But it's a delicate
place and he'd be sleeping alone for a month while it
healed.  At first he must have thought that she'd really
cut if off because he screamed terribly and started
thrashing around like a madman.  Finally he settled down
and just hung there crying.

We turned off the lights and left him there in the dark.

            -------------

We held a war council in the dining room.  None of us could
imagine spending another night in the same room with Billy
and his crew.  Eventually it came down to how long should
we wait before waking up the staff.  We wanted to leave
Billy hanging in the dark for awhile yet.

Finally we decided that two hours would be long enough.  We
passed the time dozing and talking.  We all made the
mistake of being overly careful and sympathetic towards
Mary.  Shows what great telepaths we all were.  She got fed
up and yelled at us.

"Damn you all.  Will you stop it!  He hurt me.  I hurt him
and got even.  Now I just want to forget about it.  So drop
it."

Eventually the clock struck 2 AM and we went up to the
staff quarters and pounded on the professor's door.  The
night guard showed up right away but we stared him down and
went back to our banging.  The professor came out and
confronted us.

We backed him into his room.  We'd had enough.  Nobody was
going to give us any more trouble.  We'd been attacked and
had retaliated.  We'd electrocuted one kid, cut up another,
and the third villain was so scared that he'd probably be
hiding in the woods for a week.  We had powers now and
things were going to change.  First of all, we wanted our
own quarters.  Second, no more crazy drills.  We'd do the
routine ones and worry about our own development.  Third,
Billy was to be thrown out.

Eventually the professor gave in on all of our demands
except as regards to getting rid of Billy.  Rapist or not,
it turned out that he was one of the highest scorers on the
weekly tests and the professor was not about to lose him.

Our new quarters were pleasant.  The walls were painted a
soft green with white trim.  There was even a door on the
john and enough beds for all six of us.  Although most
nights we only used four of them, it was nice that everyone
had their own space.

For training, each of us tried to share what they had with
the others and we began some very light practice sessions
to exercise our minds.  One of our ground rules was that
there would be no external forcing of talent.  What's
pushed down your throat from outside can break you.  What
you do yourself is under your control and therefore safer.
You can't hold your breath until you suffocate but someone
else can strangle you.  It was our solution to the terrible
percentage of wipeouts among our ranks.

After that our numbers remained constant.  But the other
groups continued to suffer losses.  Eventually the
remainder were reorganized into four small groups.  There
were so few that they abolished the second meal shift and
put us all together.

As a result, we started seeing Billy again at mealtimes.
He had amassed quite a following.  He'd requested and
gotten his pick during the reshuffling and had the dozen
meanest looking kids all working for him.  They were easily
the largest group around.  Jake wasn't in it.  We found out
that Billy blamed his defeat on Jake's being a coward and
running away.  Jake was afraid to walk the corridors alone
for fear of being jumped and beaten up.  We spared him no
sympathy.

Debbie managed to establish a kind of thin contact with her
twin.  There seemed to be some sort of rest home where the
dropouts were being kept in isolation.  She said that it
was kind of boring.  They gave you some light ordinary
stuff to study and fed you milk and cookies but you
couldn't go anywhere.

We began to talk about retiring to "milk and cookies" as we
started calling the place, but of course the professor
would never put up with that.  One of the attendants had
let slip that our scores had been soaring since we'd gone
off on our own.

If we'd had any sense, we'd have started faking low results
and tried to wash out, but by the time we thought of that,
it was too late to do us any good.

------------------

Now that we'd eliminated the internal conflicts, the "go
up" sessions started working.  At first it would take us an
entire day.  Our throats would be raw and our muscles stiff
before we would see even a twitch.  But gradually we
reduced the time to an hour and then even fifteen minutes.
We experimented with lighter and heavier objects to see if
there was any time difference.  The weight didn't seem to
matter but it always took longer the first time with a
strange object.  Also, when we went to doing big things
like lifting one of our beds, it took us days to get the
knack of holding the entire object in our minds.

The fact that heavier masses didn't resist more bothered us
a great deal.  We began wondering where the energy was
coming from.  It didn't seem to make us tired to keep
something up for a long time.  Once we did get an object to
rise into the air, it seemed that we could do what we
wanted with it as long as we all agreed on the same thing.
Eventually, we went outside and found a big boulder and
kept it moving around high in the sky for hours.  We all
felt strained from concentrating for so long, but there was
no physical drain.

We went and twisted the professor's arm and got a physics
class.  In exchange, we allowed some simple laboratory
measurements on the phenomena after we understood the
principles involved.  The professor and one of his
assistants, who had a degree in physics, spent weeks with
us trying and discarding theories.  The temperature of the
object didn't change nor did its chemical composition.  So
the energy was not being drained from it in some manner.
We could lift more than we could with our bodies, therefor
the energy was not coming from us.  Various sensors such as
compass needles etc. located around the room never twitched
so the feeling was that it was not some simple tapping of
outside energies.

But when they put a balance on top of a table we lifted, it
acted strangely.  It was like trying to weigh something in
a light gravity field where the slightest bit of a breeze
or a tremble had as much effect as the presence of a heavy
weight.  So they aimed a high speed camera and dropped some
steel ball bearings onto a floating table and discovered
that in the last quarter inch of fall, the acceleration due
to gravity seemed to taper off.

More esoteric measurements followed until it was firmly
established that a local gravity distortion existed around
the object.  The final theory was that the energy of
gravity was being bent back on itself and used to
accomplish its own negation.

Of course the professor then wanted to find out what would
happen if we tried this in free fall, but we drew the line
there and dropped the experiments.

Unfortunately, the halls were getting dangerous.  One day
Luke and some of Billy's other minions jumped Stevie and
broke his arm.  They took the precaution of wearing rubber
gloves and sneakers but it wasn't really necessary.  Stevie
hadn't managed any other tricks with electricity since that
fateful night.

They also cornered Eddie one day.  But he could do funny
things.  He said that he just looked at them and adjusted
his vibrations until there was nothing for them to push
against.  They fumbled around for awhile never quite
hitting him and then got disgusted and left.  But we
figured that the rest of us wouldn't be so lucky.

We retaliated at dinner one night.  We'd gotten over the
need to chant thanks to Eddie's realization that it was
simply helping us concentrate and vibrate in sympathy.  Now
all we needed was to have Debbie reach out to all of us and
pull us together mentally while we pushed at the object.
We still had no luck at real telepathy but we could
harmonize in some strange way.  There was a warm feeling
when she connected with us.

So instead of eating, we held hands covertly under the
table and concentrated on a carving knife that we had
placed between us.  At first its heavy brown handle looked
old and ugly, but soon our view of it changed and it seemed
as if it was the most beautiful thing in the world.  After
that we achieved lift and made it drift over and hang in
front of Billy's eyes.  He grabbed it and started pulling
but we were too strong by that time.  Then we wrenched it
away from him, took it high above his table, and smashed it
down into the wood in front of him with all our might.  The
blade went in over an inch deep.

We all stood up and went over to him.

"You keep your goons away from us or you'll be under it next time".

Then we turned as a group and left.

He left us alone for a week.  The next confrontation was
also in the dining room.  Our first clue was when his
entire group stood up and climbed on top of their table.
Billy had his arm gripping the shoulder of a short red
haired kid.  They just stared at us.  The two big guards
who usually were stationed in the room during mealtimes
just sat back and awaited developments.  We didn't know
what to make of it and kept waiting for Billy to make a
speech or something.

Then the tablecloth in front of us burst into flame.  We
hopped up and beat a hasty retreat.  Behind us we heard
Billy yelling.  "Next time it'll be your room".

So we made a battle plan.  Things looked like they would
escalate quickly and it was time for the rats to break out
of the maze.

We picked Eddie to go.  He had a lot of good reasons for
being the one.

"You can't go to the police because they might just bring
you back.  So you have to get to a big TV station or
something like that.  You're going to need help to reach a
big city, you won't have any money, and it will be hard to
get strangers to believe you.  You're still kids in their
eyes.  I'll have a better shot at it by matching with their
vibes and sidestepping trouble.  I'm no good in a fight
anyway, but I can handle the hardship of walking out of here."

Larry spent two days lying down with his eyes closed
gradually drawing a map of the area.  We stole supplies
from the kitchen, not only food but matches and a knife.
Late that night Eddie slipped out and disappeared off into
the woods.  His first try would be the railroad tracks a
dozen miles South of us.  Larry had seen that there was a
regular morning coal train and it would probably stop if he
built a fire on the tracks.  Eddie would try and tune in to
the engineer and decide whether to hide in one of the cars
or present himself and ask for help.

We'd hoped to lie low until the press arrived, but the
pressure was building up too fast.  Now we never went
anywhere alone, but even groups of two were not enough.
They almost got Larry and Mary and ended up chasing them
back to our room.  Since Billy's whole group was there, we
barricaded ourselves in by pushing the beds against the
door.  After awhile we heard some terrible banging and then
silence.  In the evening we decided that we should go get
dinner and we found that they'd hauled in a garbage
dumpster and upended it, blocking our door with filth.

The next day we went out and found a big grey boulder.  It
took a lot longer with only five of us but eventually we
got it under control and went back to the complex.  We made
sure that Billy and his gang were off doing drills or
something and then put the rock through the wall into their
quarters.  We rammed it around a bit and made a real
shambles of everything.

Then we raided the kitchen, grabbed all our bedding, and
took off into the woods.  One of the guards saw us and
tried to make us go back but he was too scared to force us.

That night our room went up in flames.  It was a great
show.  All the staff running around with fire extinguishers
and everyone out in their pajamas except Billy's group
who'd dressed in advance for the occasion.  We thought that
was unfair, so we concentrated for awhile on one of the
extra extinguishers that were piled up outside.  Finally we
got the red cylinder up over Billy's head and let loose
with a dose of foam.  He threw a fit and had his crew
search around but we were well hidden in a big tree and
they missed us.  We were so good by that time that we
didn't even need to surround the object as long as it was
in line of sight while we got control.

The fire wasn't really much.  The building was reasonably
well fireproofed and the walls were slow to catch flame.
Mostly just the beds and things had really burned.

Next day we showed up for dinner with a rock floating
behind us.  We had measured and gotten one that would just
barely clear the doorways.  Billy's group got up but then
sat down again and we had an armed truce while we ate.  The
professor showed up with his whole staff.  They stood along
the far wall and watched nervously but didn't take any
action.  We had to put the rock down and break hands to
eat, but we didn't think that Billy was aware of our
limitations.  Unfortunately we were wrong.  He had a sharp
eye and noticed things.

Again we spent the night out in the woods and took enough
from the kitchen to handle breakfast and lunch.  Dinner
started as before with our rock behind us and the professor
intently watching everything from the back of the room.  We
finished the main course, which was roasted chicken, in
peace.  Certainly we didn't expect any trouble before
dessert.  That shows how immature our thinking was in
comparison with our opponents.  When the staff started
bringing out the dessert trays, Billy's whole crew sprang
up and ran at us.  There was nowhere near enough time to
get the rock back up in the air so we made for the door.
Then began a wild fight as they intercepted us.  We must
have been developing more pk than we realized because some
objects started flying around without all the group
focusing rituals.  I even pk'ed a chair into one of my
attackers but then another one hit me.

The talent wasn't all one sided either.  Some of the things
flying around danced back and forth between our people and
their's with the control shifting one way and then the
other.  The professor pushed his two big bruisers into the
middle of the fray and some people on both sides paused for
a moment and cooperated in bringing some furniture down on
their heads.  We threw some silverware in the professor's
direction as well and he and his staff hastily beat a
retreat into the kitchen.

The distraction let us pull back to the door and as they
charged again Stevie finally managed to tap a wall socket.
The bolt jumped up to the big chandelier in the middle of
the room and it shattered and smashed down with a bang.
Meanwhile their pyrotic had gotten some small flames
dancing on the doorframe behind us, but it turned out to be
a help because we had time to back out and then the flames
grew and slowed the pursuit.

We rushed into an empty dorm and piled the beds up against
the door.  Eventually they'd break in or burn the place
around us, but we had time now to try and lift something.
The question was what.  A piece of furniture seemed too
small for the occasion and there was nothing bigger in sight.

It was Mary who had the idea.  She went over and pounded on a wall.

"What's big around here?  This is big.  The wall.  The building".

"Aw common, we can't see the whole thing".

"But Larry can if he works at it.  And Debbie can pull us
all into contact".

So amid the smash of fire axes as they chopped at the door
and furniture protecting us, we began to concentrate. We
pushed and focused and pushed and finally the structure
around us began to tremble.

Our hold wasn't as good as usual.  We were filtering
through Larry's vague remote perception and we had the
additional problem of extending our minds to enclose the
whole space of the thing.  So one or another of us kept
slipping and the building rocked and trembled.  Then it
tore free of its foundations and hung there over our heads.

The TV pictures that we saw later were just wild.  It
turned out that there were two camera crews up there in the
woods and another one all set to drive up to the gate for a
confrontation the next morning.  Eddie had stopped the
train as planned and found some sympathetic vibrations.
When he told the engineer that the government was
experimenting on children and that some had died or gone
mad, he got a nice ride in the diesel engine's cab all the
way down to Norfolk.  The engineer even took him home for
the night and then went with him over to an NBC affiliate
station.  They had a marshall and a court order arriving in
the morning.

The films showed the entire outside pulling up off the
ground.  Some of the interior walls went up with it, but
most of the ones on the first floor stayed nailed down on
the foundation.  The effect of the walls open to the sky
looked a bit like a rat's maze.  We thought this was quite
appropriate considering how we'd been treated.

Everybody except us scattered out of the building like ants
when they saw all that wood and masonry hanging up there
above them.  It was pretty scary for everyone including us.
We couldn't hold it very well and it was shaking violently
with pieces falling off.  So we threw it into the side of a
hill and collapsed with relief.  Luckily, it wasn't one of
the hills where the camera crews were hiding.

---------------------------

Our parents were waiting for us back in Norfolk.  Eddie had
taken our old addresses with him and the station had flown
them in.  The other kids had to wait for their's to be
contacted and missed having their reunions shown on the 6
o'clock News.  Mine was stiff and strained.  We didn't know
each other anymore.  Nor did my parents ever really come to
understand me or what I'd been through.  It didn't help
that I refused to talk about it.

If the reporters were short-changed by my performance, they
were paid back double when Debbie and Lisa were reunited.
It was a classic dash, culminating in a tearful embrace.
That scene and the shot of the mansion smashing into the
hillside formed the basis for the television coverage.  But
they missed the most important part of the story, which was
just as well.

We'd briefly seen Rhonda, Fred, and Willie at the hotel
where the TV station put us up that first night.  Willie
was pretty far gone and kept calling us children of Satan.
The news clips of our escapade had been the last straw for
him.  I think he eventually became some sort of evangelist
preacher.  Fred and Rhonda were both glad to see us alive
but they kept their distance.  Neither of them wanted
anything more to do with psychokinesis and we were a
painful reminder.  I especially felt the gap between myself
and Rhonda.  We had been friends.

We got the message and agreed amongst ourselves to downplay
the paranormal aspects of our story.  Apparently Billy's
crew felt the same way because nobody opened up with any
details of those final days.  The reporters simply thought
we were maltreated child geniuses who had blown up the
building with some sort of secret device.  Later, when the
government came across with large cash settlements and
conveniently lost all record of the experiments, we went
along with the lie.  It was far better to be considered
eccentric wiz kids than to be labled as freaks.

For a time we even tried to live the lie.  But there is no
return for the butterfly once it leaves its cocoon.  It
might briefly pine for the loss of its caterpillar
existence, but a bright new world has opened before it.

(Note that this is one of five parts comprising the
novel "Flying is Forever" originally written in 1988
under the working title "Raincoats".)


======================================

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