Read Psion for Free Online Page B

anything he saw or heard perfectly; that it was a skill any psion could develop, even me, if I wanted to work at it. I told him I had enough problems. But he must have read nearly everything ever written, and almost anything I asked about he’d explain: stardrives or computer memories or just what my pants were made of. . . .
    “. . . and telhassium is the thing that ties them all together. It makes the data processing detailed enough and the transportation economical enough so that it’s worth someone’s while to make cheap denim clothing on Earth and ship it all the way to Ardattee.”
    “Yeah?” I rubbed the knee of my jeans. “These really came all the way from Earth? Hell, they’ve seen more of the galaxy than I have.” I laughed.
    “They have a longer history, too. The original denim cloth . . .” And he was off again. Half the time what he told me was so technical I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I tried not to let it show. Sometimes I wondered whether he really understood what he said himself.
    But he seemed to enjoy having an audience. Not the way a performer did, or not exactly-it wasn’t just that he liked to show off. But sometimes I caught flashes of a need that ran strong and deep inside him, felt him aching for acceptance. I was a challenge to him, and from the minute I’d taken that first camph and started answering him, I’d been feeding a little bit of that need. Knowing that, I used his need, because that was what life was all about-using and being used. I knew how to fake interest; and sometimes I didn’t even have to fake it when I was listening to him. That just made it easier. “What’s-telhassium, that makes things go?”
    He smiled, blissed on the pure pleasure of knowledge. His eyes looked toward something beyond the pastel green laboratory walls. “Telhassium is element one-seventy. Its pure form is a blue-silver crystal used for information storage in computers. They lock data into the electron shells, and they can run a whole planet’s information system on a crystal as big as your thumb. Telhassium makes starship travel easy, giving navigators the number-crunching computers that can set up a long jump in hours instead of weeks.”
    “Before they had telhassium, starships cost a fortune, and they couldn’t even . . .” He went on into a wilderness of words, all of them longer than my arm. “And now even a fast ship like a patrol cruiser carries less than a cubic meter of telhassium crystals on board for its computations. The big cargo ships only carry a little more telhassium than an entire planet uses; and only in case of emergency, because they use the computers of mainline ports like Quarro to do their navigation. A major spaceport can compute a jump to any important system in the Federation, except in the Crab Colonies, in less than an hour.”
    “Whew.” I rubbed my forehead. My mind was still stumbling in the undergrowth of words somewhere back along the trail. “I feel like I swallowed my brain.”
    “Then maybe we’d better get down to work.” He glanced at his data bracelet, looking at the time.
    “Hey, not yet. I got more questions. . . .” I never had enough questions, because once he’d answered all I could come up with, we had to work on my telepathy.
    “You must lie awake nights thinking them up.” His voice began to show an edge.
    “I always work best after midnight.” But it wasn’t by choice anymore. My eyes burned from the lack of sleep. I leaned back in my seat, waiting for him to start talking again. “Gimme another camph, will you?” I put a hand out on the cool white tabletop, palm up.
    He didn’t move, sitting across from me. (You’ll have to work for it this time.)
    I jerked and swore, unbalancing my chair. “Don’t do that to me!”
    (Why not? That’s why we’re here.)
    “No!” I flinched as I heard it come out. “I mean, I know that. But I need more time. I just ain’t-ready.” I was pulling my thoughts in