"

"Lou's ... job?" Malone said. He felt his own shield go up. The
thoughts behind it weren't pleasant. Lou had been ... well, hired to
stay with him. She had pretended to like him; it was part of her job.

That was perfectly clear now.

Horribly clear.

"You are now on your way," Sir Lewis said, "to being a real
psionicist."

"Fine," Malone said dully. "But why me? Why not, oh, Wolfe Wolf? I'd
think he'd have a better chance than I would."

"My secretary," Burris said, "has talents enough of his own. But you,
you're something brand-new. It's wonderful, Malone. It's exciting."

"It's a new taste thrill," Malone murmured. "Try Bon-Ton B-Complex
Bolsters. Learn to eat your blanket as well as sleep with it."

"What?" Burris said.

"Never mind," Malone said. "You wouldn't understand."

"But I--"

"I know you wouldn't," Malone said, "because I don't."

Sir Lewis cleared his throat "My dear boy," he said, "you represent a
breakthrough. You are an adult."

"That," Malone said testily, "is not news."

"But you are a telepathic adult," Sir Lewis said. "Many of them are
capable of developing it into a useful ability. Children who have the
talent may accidentally develop the ability to use it, but that almost
invariably results in insanity. Without proper guidance, a child is no
more capable of handling the variety of impressions it receives from
adult minds than it is capable of understanding a complex piece of
modern music. The effort to make a coherent whole out of the
impression overstrains the mind, so to speak, and the damage is
permanent."

"So here I am," Malone said, "and I'm not nuts. At least I don't think
I'm nuts."

"Because you are an adult," Sir Lewis went on. "Telepathy seems to be
almost impossible to develop in an adult, even difficult to test for
it. A child may be tested comparatively simply; an adult, seldom or
never."

He paused to relight his pipe.

"However," he went on, "the Psychical Research Society's executive
board discovered a method of bringing out the ability in a talented
child as far back as 1931. All of us who are sane telepaths today owe
our ability to that process, which was applied to us, in each case,
before the age of sixteen."

"How about me?" Malone said.

"You," Sir Lewis said, "are the first adult ever to learn the use of
psionic powers from scratch."

"Oh," Malone said. "And that's why Mike Fueyo, for instance, could
learn to teleport, though his older sist