Free Pegasus in Flight by Anne McCaffrey Page B

my little finger. Please . . .”
    “Hey, what the—?” the electrician exclaimed. The diagnostic reader he had just hooked up had unexpectedly registered a blip.
    While Peter gamely concentrated on his body-brace drills, the electrician checked out the bed’s wiring, but except for that one brief blip, he could find no short, no dysfunction in any of the circuitry. By the time an exhausted Peter was back in his bed, the electrician had done a thorough test of all the specialized treatment electronics in the ward. Baffled by the continual surges on the ward’s circuits, the man left a small monitor attached to the one piece of equipment that had registered an abnormality, slight though it had been, and left.
    Peter knew by her face that Sue Romero was disappointed in him. He did try to make his body remember how to move. The frame sent electrical impulses into his atrophied muscles, the theory being that the little jolts would restimulate neural and muscular activity. He hated that intrusion into his body even more than he hated being paralyzed.
    “Peter, if you would only stop resisting the mechanism,” Sue said reproachfully. “If you would only go with it, instead of denying the help it could give you. You could, you know, even get to the platform. Your schoolwork was excellent—there’d be no problem with the educational end . . .” She trailed off, fighting her own dispiritedness. Sometimes with the very badly damaged children, she felt she was pounding at the well-known immovable object—generally, as in Peter’s case, the child itself.
    The boy was exhausted, eyes closed, arms and legs sprawled just as he had been rolled out of the body brace. Sue Romero could not afford to pity him—it was unprofessional and helped neither of them in his rehabilitation—but she did. As she turned away, she thought he was sleeping. She would have been amazed to learn that he was reviewing that vision of the Center, with its trees and lawns and . . . Rhyssa Owen.
     
    That night, Rhyssa was wakeful, going over and over that telecast. She had felt good about it during filming. Dave Lehardt had done his job well. They would, of course, have to wait until opinions had been sampled, but Rhyssa felt that Barchenka was coming out a poor second at the moment, despite her apparent triumph at the cowardly capitulation of the effete Talents. Rhyssa fretted that she had somehow weakened the consolidated strength of Talents and wondered how she could rectify what was still, in the minds of most Talented, an untenable position with Barchenka getting her way.
    She felt then the gossamer touch—envious, yearning, wistful, and so terribly sad that a sob clogged her throat.
Wait, little friend,
she murmured in the softest of tones.
    Say what?
With the voice came mixed impressions of startlement, sense of apology-denial-rejection, and an astringent smell. And then the touch—timorous and reluctant—was gone.
    Rhyssa tried to follow, her touch feather soft, but the retreat had been too swift, like a flicker of shadow across the moonlight outside her window. She made a quick note of the time: 3:43. Then she lay there savoring that touch, examining it, letting her perception analyze it.
    Such swiftness suggested a young mind—no old thoughts or experiences to slow the instantaneity of action. A boy on a prank . . . A boy? Doing an out-of-body maneuver? A boy in a hospital—yes, a hospital would account for the astringent odor—his movement constrained so that only his mind could travel?
    That fit the pieces together so perfectly that Rhyssa got out of bed and paced over to the console.
    “Bud, I want a call out to all hospital Talents,” she said, unable to keep the elation out of her voice.
    “The peeper caught you again?”
    “That’s right. An adolescent boy, quite likely crippled or paralyzed. I want to see who was awake on the wards at three-forty-three this morning.”
    “The last thing you need tonight is some