oesn't mean too much from anybody
else's standpoint, and I certainly don't need any training there. But
where along the line do I pick up a thought impulse? Do I catch it at
its inception? Do I pick up the thought formulation, or just the final
crystalized pattern? Lambertson thinks I'm with it right from the start,
and that some training in those lines would be worth my time.

Of course, we didn't find out, not even with the ingenious little
random-firing device that Dakin designed for the study. With this
gadget, neither Lambertson nor I know what impulse the box is going to
throw at him. He just throws a switch and it starts coming. He catches
it, reacts, I catch it from him and react, and we compare reaction
times. This afternoon it had us driving up a hill, and sent a ten-ton
truck rolling down on us out of control. I had my flasher on two seconds
before Lambertson did, of course, but our reaction times are
standardized, so when we corrected for my extra speed, we knew that I
must have caught the impulse about 0.07 seconds after he did.

Crude, of course, not nearly fast enough, and we can't reproduce on a
stable basis. Lambertson says that's as close as we can get without
cortical probes. And that's where I put my foot down. I may have a gold
mine in this head of mine, but nobody is going to put burr-holes through
my skull in order to tap it. Not for a while yet.

That's unfair, of course, because it sounds as if Lambertson were trying
to force me into something, and he isn't. I've read him about that, and
I know he wouldn't allow it. _Let's learn everything else we can learn
without it first_, he says. _Later, if you want to go along with it,
maybe. But right now you're not competent to decide for yourself._

He may be right, but why not? Why does he keep acting as if I'm a child?
_Am_ I, really? With everything (and I mean _everything_) coming into my
mind for the past twenty-three years, haven't I learned enough to make
decisions for myself? Lambertson says of course everything has been
coming in, it's just that I don't know what to do with it all. But
somewhere along the line I have to reach a maturation point of some
kind.

It scares me, sometimes, because I can't find an answer to it and the
answer might be perfectly horrible. I don't know where it may end.
What's worse, I don't know what point it has reached _right now_. How
much difference is there between my mind and Lambertson's? I'm psi-high,
and h