Science fiction; Subconsciousness -- Fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
Hawkes had treated himself secretly, not knowing that Meinzer had done
the same two days before. And both had learned the same thing. The
wild talents appeared, but they couldn't be controlled. Meinzer hadn't
found security in the hospital, hard as he'd tried to find it. He'd
gotten up in the middle of the night and walked through the solid
wall, unable to stop until he was back with the group.
Hawkes had tried another way to stop the wild abilities that operated
without his conscious control. He'd prepared a new hypnotic tape,
worded to make him forget everything he knew, or even the fact that he
had worked on the psi factor. He'd put in commands that would make him
avoid any reference to it, so that he couldn't learn accidentally.
He'd ordered his brain to have nothing to do with it. Then he'd
drugged himself with a combination of opiates and hypnotics that
should have knocked out a horse. Then he'd telephoned Dan to have men
pick him up in an hour and keep him drugged. He'd turned on the tape
recorder and stumbled back to the bed.
He groaned, as he remembered his failure. "It's the ultimate, absolute
alien, all right--the back of a man's own mind. It's Freud's
unconsciousness, or id. The psi factor is controlled by that, and not
by the conscious mind. And the id is a primitive beast--it operates on
raw impulse, without reason or social consciousness. Every man's
unconsciousness is back in the jungle, before civilization--and we've
given that alien thing the greatest power that could exist when we
wake up the psi power."
"Meinzer thought it was controlled, for a while," Ellen said. "He came
when Dan and I called him. I went with him up to your apartment, while
Dan got the men to carry you away. But we couldn't reach you--Meinzer
barely touched the tape-recorder when something seemed to pick us up
and drive us out of the room and down the stairs. We were just going
back when you came out."
She shuddered, and Hawkes nodded. He'd obviously used that psi factor
to throw off the drugs at the first sign of anyone near him. He told
them sickly what had happened to the old man.
"So I killed him," he finished bitterly.
Dan shook his head. "No. Your psi factor works differently. You
control heat and radiation, you can move yourself or any object in
space for almost any distance, instantly if you want, and it seems you
can do the same through time. But you can't disintegrate things, as
Meinzer could. He had a suicide urge--we knew that before. When it got
out of control again, he blew himself up--just as your dominant urge
to protect yourself did all those things around you."
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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