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  The Golden People by Fred Saberhagen

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Fourteen-year-old Ray Kedro was backed up against one of the mural-painted walls in the Middle Boys' recreation yard doing what he could to defend himself, when twelve-year-old Adam Mann first saw him. Adam glanced up from the electronic pages of Space Force Adventures, and watched for a few moments with a playground veteran's indifference. Then he realized that the six kids facing Ray had more in mind than the routine taunting and roughing that they were likely to hand out to any newcomer. This time some of the guys were really hot about something.

  Most of the angry bunch were a year or two older than Adam, and all but one of them were taller. But he was widely respected on this territory. He folded the comic book, the electronic pictures on the thin plastic pages darkening into lifeless-ness as he did so, and stuffed it into his pocket. Moving in the slightly swaggering gait that he had recently developed to what he considered near-perfection, he walked toward the group.

  "What goes on?" Adam demanded. He had dark eyes that were often, as now, belligerent, medium brown hair with a slight curl in it, and a nose that had not been broken—not yet at least—but looked as if it might have been.

  "He's a snooper." Big tough Pete swung out a long arm and slapped the new kid again. "He can read your mind. He's gonna be singin' for the bosses here—"

  "I'm not!" The new kid was tall for the age-group of this yard, but thin, with incongruously good clothes that were dusty and rumpled now from his being pushed around. Mussed blond hair fell over blue eyes that looked scared but still didn't blink at being slapped. He had a handsome face, almost delicate, and bleeding now a little along one cheekbone and from the nose. But he didn't look to Adam like a sissy, only like a guy who couldn't understand what it was all about.

  "He made them dice move!" another guy standing beside Big Pete put in. The tone made it a deadly accusation.

  "You wanted me to play with dice!" the new kid shouted back at them. To Adam he still looked more angry than afraid. "I had to show you first what I can do. If I play dice with you, you'll have to trust me—"

  "Play dice, play dice!" Pete mimicked, in a changing, cracking voice. Whenever Pete's voice betrayed him in that way, making him sound funny, he got mad, and now it made him madder than ever. "You goddam fairy!"

  The guys were all yelling now, and waving fists. Adam was suddenly scared, in a cold, clear way. Not so much afraid of getting hurt, but that these guys he knew could get so wild over something like this. Some stupid nonsense that didn't matter. It didn't sound like the new guy had really done them any harm.

  Adam was beginning to understand, vaguely, or he thought he was. There were, there had always been, a few people in the world who could move dice in more subtle ways than with their fingers, move dice or other small objects using their minds alone. The same people, or others with unusual mental powers, could perform other tricks, equally unsettling. Parapsych talents, the books in the Home library called such abilities. Up until only a few years ago hardly any scientists had believed that such things existed. And Adam had never to his knowledge met any of the rare folk who were so gifted.

  The little mob was surging forward, bent on destruction. On impulse, Adam shoved his own strong and stocky body in front of the new kid, and knocked down big Pete's upraised arm. "Let 'im alone!"

  Big Pete halted, gaping. "Why?"

  "Because I say so!"

  Pete gave an angry grunt, and swung. Adam's reflexes and timing were already superb; his head moved safely out of harm's way, and his own right fist was already in a good position to hit back. He got enough weight behind his counterpunch to flatten Big Pete's nose.

  Furious and clumsy, the little mob closed in on Adam and the new kid. Something hit Adam, hard, on the side of his head. In a daze, he found himself flat on his back on the playground's genegineered grass, looking up at a ring of faces filled with hate and excitement. In a way, though he knew better, it seemed to Adam that they were all playacting, they couldn't be serious about this great stupidity they were engaged in. A part of his mind kept wanting to laugh at the foolishness of it all, even while he kicked and struck up at the lowering faces, and feet kicked back at him.

  Then the recreation yard monitors came, running and shouting threats, from wherever they had been goofing off. They were older teenagers, full of strength and energy once they got started, and they arrived just in time to break up the fight before anyone was killed or crippled.

  Half an hour later, sitting on a cot in the infirmary, waiting to get his lumps patched up, Adam listened with some satisfaction to the moans and curses coming from the next cubicle. That was where they were working on Big Pete, and from the snatches of the medics' talk that Adam could hear, it sounded like maybe Pete's nose was really broken.

  Beside Adam sat the new kid, holding a coldpack to his head. His battered and dirty face was still handsome, but an empty, stunned look occupied it now. He was quivering faintly.

  Adam asked him: "What's your name, guy?"

  "Ray Kedro." The kid pulled in a deep breath, that helped him regain a measure of steadiness. He looked at Adam. "You may have saved my life today—I won't forget it." He tested a loose tooth gingerly with his fingers. "You're name's Adam? I hope this doesn't mean a lot more trouble for you."

  Adam tried to laugh with a split lip. "Hey, they won't do much to us for fighting. Long as nobody got killed. Some extra duty probably is all. I was about due to hang one on Pete anyhow. Hey, was all that true, about you being a parapsych?" It was the first time Adam had ever tried to pronounce that fancy word, but he felt pretty sure that he had it right.

  Ray hesitated, looking at him closely, then nodded. "I have—some of those—talents."

  "Dice?"

  "I could if I tried, I suppose."

  "What about reading minds?"

  The other shook his head. "You just don't reach into someone else's thoughts, for no good reason. It'd be like… well, like doing the dirtiest thing you can imagine. I mean, I wouldn't like it any more than the person I was reading would."

  "Huh." When Adam heard it put that way, it sounded more intriguing and at the same time more repulsive than before.

  As if encouraged by Adam's reaction, or lack of one, Ray went on: "Maybe you can do it, but you don't. Of course if the other person wants you to get into their mind, and tells you so, that's different."

  "Huh." Adam considered. "Hey, you know, I read somewhere once that any parapsych who could move dice with his mind could kill people too, just as easy. You know, just grab a little valve or something in their heart—"

  "No." Ray's voice was flat and certain. "The talents don't work like that, they won't kill."

  "They won't, huh?"

  "They never have. There've been people who have tried it, but they just make themselves sick. Oh, someone might find a way to do it someday. Someone who was evil enough and worked at it. There are a few very rare cases—but those are spontaneous combustion—" The blond boy broke off, smiling suddenly, wincing as he did. "If I had any kind of a knockout punch, I'd have used it out there today."

  "Hey, yeah, I guess."

  Adam's prediction about the degree and type of punishment for fighting in the recreation yard was proven accurate. All those who had been involved in the playground brawl were given extra work, beginning the next day after school.

  Assigned to work together, using ,a sonic machine to clean the walls and floor of a long corridor tiled in white and green, Adam and Ray talked again.

  Adam asked his new acquaintance: "You kn
ow anyone else who's a parapsych?"

  "Yes. Ninety-nine of them, to be exact."

  "Ninety-nine!"

  Ray paused thoughtfully. "Ever hear of a doctor, a medical researcher, named Emiliano Nowell?"

  Adam tried to remember the name. He looked through daily news printouts sometimes, on days when he didn't use up all his reading time on library books and adventure comics. And he read news magazines when he could find them. "Emiliano Nowell. Isn't he the guy who bought out an old Space Force installation way out on Ganymede, and set up a place there to do research? Why'd he go way out there?"

  "He wanted privacy. Not to be bothered."

  Adam could understand that. "And he was raising kids there out of bottles, until the government found out about it, and… Hey. Are you—"

  Ray was mechanically guiding the cleaning machine along, not really looking where it was going, but not looking at Adam either. "Yes, I'm one of his kids. The law took us all away from him and

  Regina—that's his wife—and split us up, put us all in different Homes while they try to figure out what to do with us next. We can still touch minds with each other, now and then."

  "You were raised way out on Ganymede? Wow."

  "Not for very long. We were all brought to Earth about ten years ago. Doc owns quite a bit of real estate here too."

  Adam was fascinated. He stared at Ray. "You look—human, like everyone else."

  In the blue eyes deep pain was visible for just a moment. "We came from human seed, from human cells."

  "Then what's the difference? I mean…" Adam was confused. Somehow he would have expected anyone he met with parapsych talents experts to be around three meters tall, and look like either the hero or the villain of a hologram thriller. Of course if he thought about it, that was crazy.

  Adam was still curious, but he didn't know what to say now. He realized that he had just given offense by implying that Ray might not be human, and he was trying not to do so again.

  Ray asked him: "Do you know what genes are?"

  "No. Oh, wait, maybe…"

  "They're little parts in the center of a living cell. Of all the human cells that make up your body. They decide everything you inherit from your parents: the way you look, your potential intelligence, and your parapsych potential too. What Doctor Nowell did was find a way to make forcefield manipulators small enough and controllable enough to use them to work on genes directly. Get right in and move the molecules and even the parts of molecules around. He experimented first on animal cells, and then on human. When he thought he had the technique perfected, he rebuilt a hundred fertilized human egg cells. And then he stopped."

  "Why?"

  "He says he wants to wait a quarter of a century, to see how his first batch turns out—that's us— before he does any more. Meanwhile he's keeping his techniques a secret, and some people are unhappy about that."

  "Then you're what they call Jovians, in the news sometimes."

  "That's right."

  "He rebuilt you to be perfect, huh? You don't sound too happy about it."

  "I wouldn't say perfect… I don't think Doc tried for that. What does perfect mean? Anyway, if we were, I don't think the world would like it. Whatever he tried for, Adam, we're very lucky. A lot of people are still born crippled."

  Adam was silent for a while, working away with the cleaning nozzle, attacking stubborn stains on battered tile. This new kid Ray gave him a lot to think about. Ray talked with fancy words and a kind of accent that Adam supposed meant he had been brought up a long way from public Homes. But that way of talking sounded natural, for him.

  Ray too was silent, as if he were thinking something out. Then he suddenly spoke up again. "Look, Adam, if things go right, the way I think they will, and I get out of here pretty soon… how'd you like to come to Doc's place for a visit?"

  Adam almost dropped the cleaning nozzle. "You mean to Ganymede?" For Adam at twelve the Space Force and its activities were a holy cause; but space travel of any kind seemed to exist only in an alternate universe from the one he really lived in, something to be glimpsed only in stories and dreams.

  Ray smiled. "No, no, none of us have been out there for years. I meant come to Doc's place here on Earth. That's where we've been living most of our lives. It's mostly one huge building, a little like an expensive boarding school. There are legal reasons why Doc doesn't want anyone but his own kids to live there permanently, but you'd be a welcome visitor."

  "Gee, I'd like to see it. You sound like you're sure he's going to win all this court stuff and get you kids back with him again."

  Ray's smile broadened. "I know him pretty well."

  Chapter Two

  The windows of the big laboratory room were wide, and open, and unbarred, and they framed Virginia mountains blue with distance. The giant chair in the middle of the room looked quite a bit like one that Adam had seen, and occasionally occupied, in the Home's infirmary. In that chair at the Home all the kids were tested once a year, and those with suspected brain damage sometimes received treatment. It, like everything else at the Home, looked worn and scrubbed, while this chair, like all the other equipment here in Doc Emiliano Nowell's laboratory, looked modern and expensive.

  There were other and still more drastic differences between the two establishments. Here, the unbarred windows looked out from every room, onto what seemed to Adam like kilometers of green trees and grass and gardens. It was hard to believe that one man owned it all, even though Ray and the other kids had assured Adam that the boundary of the estate fell short of including those blue distant mountains.

  At the moment Adam was sitting in the giant chair himself, trying to get comfortable under a huge metal helmet that had been let gently down until the probes it carried inside it sank through his brown hair, just to the point where they began to tickle his scalp.

  "Doc, can I ask you something?" he wondered aloud, a little timidly.

  "Sure. As long as I don't have to guarantee an answer." Doc—everyone around the place, children, servants, lab technicians, seemed to call him that— was a tall, lean, graying man, presently wearing a laboratory coat. He was seated halfway across the large room, in front of the psych-chair's control panel. He had, with Adam's ready permission, begun to put the young visitor through a series of physical and mental tests. Doc wanted to do this, as he had said, just out of curiosity. The two were alone, for the moment, in the lab.

  Adam hesitated once more, then put his question: "About how much money have you got?"

  Doc Nowell had a contagious laugh. "I thought you might be getting worried about the machine. Or wondering what position emission tomography meant." A little earlier, Adam had been reading those words aloud, from the equipment used in the last test. "How much money, huh? Well, Adam, let's just say that I'm too rich to be pushed around in court. My wealth is sufficient for my purposes. Which makes me a rarity among scientists… or among human beings in general, I suppose."

  "That's neat, Doc."

  "Yes, it is." Watching the panel in front of him, Doc paused to make a note on paper. "Oh, I haven't earned my money from society by probing for the secrets of life. No. It's mine by inheritance. Candy and chewing gum, mostly, a couple of generations back."

  Halfway down one of the room's long walls, a door slid open, and a girl entered the laboratory. Merit Creston was a year younger than Adam, which made her by about three years the baby of Doc's hundred genengineered children. The ages of most of the others were clustered closely together, and ranged up to seventeen. Adam was, at least by strict chronology, a visiting child among adolescents. But he, who had come as an infant to the public Home, could scarcely remember ever thinking of himself as a child. His teen-age hosts had obviously enjoyed a vastly different upbringing than his, and they impressed him as being mentally more grown-up than any group of adults he had ever encountered. Still, they were all so good at saying and doing the right thing that the visiting twelve-year-old rarely felt out of place.

  Merit
stood there in the doorway of the psych lab, wearing white shorts and a white blouse and a kind of footgear that Adam had learned were called tennis sandals. Merit's slender figure was developing already. Her face, in Adam's opinion, was—well, beautiful. And her hair had a kind of glint in it that made it really unlike the color of any other girl's hair that Adam had ever seen…

  He knew that in a year or so he would start wanting girls in a physical way, like the older guys at the Home. What he felt about Merit now wasn't really that. It was something more—or maybe something less, Adam didn't know which. All he knew for sure was that he felt something powerful, and felt confused and strange whenever he tried to think about it.

  Eleven-year-old Merit greeted him now with a giggle. "Hi, Ad. You look like you're getting your hair set."

  Adam grunted. The problem was that he wanted desperately to say something witty, to show he didn't mind if she teased him a little, but he could think of no words at all. Suddenly he remembered there were a hundred telepaths, or at least potential telepaths, within a few hundred meters of him. Now he could feel his face getting warm. Why in hell did she have to stand there giggling at him—

  "I think you'd better leave, young lady," said Doc, raising his head from his control panel. "You're a disturbing influence just now."

  "All right, Grouchy Doc," said Merit. She spoke as if humoring some elderly and harmless relative— but she didn't argue. "Call me if he's mean to you, Adam." She winked at the boy in the chair, and gracefully closed the door behind her.

  "So long," Adam called out, lamely, at the last moment, as the door was already closing. Suddenly he felt angry with Merit, irritated with Doc, with Doc's wife Regina, with the whole crew of these people here, who had so damn much more going for them than any group that Adam had ever met before.

  The lean man in the lab coat sighed, bending over his control panel again. Then he straightened up. "Let's try something, Adam." With an air of decision, almost a theatrical gesture, Doc raised and let fall a hand, extended finger touching one of the panel switches. Adam could feel no change. Doc said: "I want you to close your eyes now, and imagine a black screen, waiting for a picture."