I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors. But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds. "Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son--" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it--"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something. I felt ... well, good. * * * * * "I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once. "The ability to heal _is_ recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it." "Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously. "Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?" I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess." She nodded. "Certain people must have had the healing power and that's probably why they originally got to be the rulers." In a very short time, I became a pretty important person. All the other deficients in the world were tested for the healing power and all of them turned out negative. I proved to be the only human healer alive, and not only that, I could work a thousand times more efficiently and effectively than any of the machines. The government built a hospital just for my work! Wounded people were ferried there from all over the world and I cured them. I could do practically everything except raise the dead and sometimes I wondered whether, with a little practice, I wouldn't be able to do even that. When I came to my new office, whom did I find waiting there for me but Lucy, her trim figure enhanced by a snug blue and white uniform. "I'm your assistant, Kev," she said shyly. I looked at her. "You are?" "I--I hope you want me," she went on, coyness now mixing with apprehension.