Human experimentation in medicine -- Fiction; Murder -- Fiction; Science fiction
He stood up, walked across the room and stared down at the pallid-faced
man in the bed. "This answers so many things, Roger," he said finally.
"We knew old Jacob Meyer had a son, of course. We even suspected then
that the son might share some of his powers. But this! We never dreamed
it. The father and son were practically two people with one mind, in
almost perfect mutual rapport. Only the son was so young he couldn't
understand what was wrong. All he knew was that he 'felt' Daddy and
could tell what Daddy was thinking. Actually, everything that went on
in his father's mind--_everything_--was in his mind too. At least, in
the peak of the old man's cycle of insanity--"
Schiml looked up sharply. "Then there's no doubt in your mind that the
old man was insane?"
Conroe shook his head. "Oh, no. There was no doubt. He was insane, all
right. A psychiatric analysis of his behavior was enough to convince
me of that, even if following him and watching him wasn't. He had a
regular cycle of elation and depression, so regular it could almost be
clocked. He'd even spotted the symptoms of the psychosis himself, back
in his college days. But of course he hadn't realized what it was. All
he knew was that at certain times he seemed to be surrounded by these
peculiar phenomena, which happened rapidly and regularly at those times
when he was feeling elated, on top of the world. And at other times
he seemed to carry with him an aura of depression. Actually, when he
hit the blackest depths of his depressions, he would be bringing about
whole waves of suicides and depression--errors and everything else."
Conroe took a deep breath. "We knew all this at the time, of course.
What we didn't know was that the old man had been seeking the answer
himself, actively seeking it. All we knew was that he was actively the
most dangerous man alive on Earth, and that until he was killed he
would become more and more dangerous--dangerous enough to shake the
very roots of our civilization."
Schiml nodded slowly. "And you're sure that his destructive use of his
power was a result directly of the insanity?"
Conroe frowned. "Not quite," he said after a moment. "Actually, you
couldn't say that Jacob Meyer 'used' his extra-sensory powers. They
weren't, for the most part, the kind of powers he could either control
or 'use.' They were the sort of powers that just happened. He had a
power, and when he was running high--in a period of elation, when
everything was on top of the world--the power functioned. He fairly
exuded this power that he carried, and the higher he rose in his
elation, the more viciously dangerous the power became."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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