Free The World Wreckers by Marion Zimmer Bradley Page B

soft and belied the look of sensuous beguilement the girl turned on them both. She said in her
    lovely murmur, "I'm a little bewildered here." A lie , something in David said, cold and precise. "I thought it would be exciting to meet all of you. An adventure." Another lie. What does she want?
    Jason urged him on and Conner sank into the seat beside Missy. That was evidently what he had wanted.
    "Leaving me till last, as usual," said a sprightly voice. It was the old woman, and she was even older than David had thought: wrinkled, her face shrunken, but erect and slender as ever in a long graceful
    robe of thick, dark blue woven wool, over it a slight shawl of knitted fur. Her hands, knotted and gnarled with age, were still graceful in motion, and the voice clear and light. Her eyes rested on Missy, not with the condemnation of age for youth but with an echo of David's own curiosity. Then she came back to
    David. "You must be weary of running this gauntlet. I am Desideria of Storn, and if I am rude, forgive me; I have never met Terrans in this number. But no one, as they say in the mountains, is so young he
    cannot teach or so old he cannot learn. So let us see what we have to learn from one another, all of us.
    It's likely to be more than any of us expect. I am too old to waste time in preliminaries. Jason?"
    Dr. Allison said, "Regis, you're the expert. You take charge."
    "But that's exactly what I am not," Regis Hastur said.
    David admired the way that without moving, without raising his voice, he gathered all their eyes to him.
    For the first time David thought, at the back of his mind, that perhaps being a developed telepath who
    could use all the latent powers of his own mind might not be such a bad thing.
    Regis went on: "As most of you know, telepaths were once abundant on this planet. They are now
    growing scarce, and their old powers are to a large degree lost, bred out or diminished for lack of
    knowledge on how to use them. To some extent I know what I can do with my powers, such as they are.
    I don't know exactly what they are or how I use them. I gather most of you are in the same situation.
    Hence this project, which at the moment is only a small pilot project to find out what powers, exactly,
    each of us has; how we got them and why; exactly what they are good for; whether training plays any
    part in their development; and so forth. In short, to find out what telepaths are made of. But as to where we start—I have no idea. Each of us has some experience. Each one of you is welcome to contribute
    ideas and questions and we'll follow up as many of them as seem to have the slightest bearing on the
    case. Meanwhile—" and he made a courteous gesture, "please consider yourselves my guests, and if there is anything any of you require, you have only to ask."
    "Then as the only nontelepath in the group," Jason Allison said, "I'm going to suggest that we start in a peculiarly Terran way. There is a lot of superstitious rubbish talked about psi powers. The first thing we Terrans usually do if we run across something we don't understand is to measure it. So, if all of you will cooperate, I am going to start—with David Hamilton's help—by giving each one of you a physical
    examination to see if you have any physical features in common. This will mean, among other things, a
    full reading of detectable brain electricity and radiation. After that I am going to try and measure your psi abilities, although I'm prepared to find out that we don't have the right measuring sticks. You can't measure anything until you develop the right scales. But maybe some of you can help me find a scale for
    measuring. David, suppose I start with you, and then you can help me with the others. The laboratories
    they've given us are just a few doors from here; I'm sorry to keep the rest of you waiting, but it won't be long."
    As they went into a small examination room—it was marked SPECIAL PROJECT , A , Allison —David said to Jason, "What's