Balance of Power Read Online Free

pillow, and it cast a shadow across her face when she put up a hand to shield her eyes from its direct glare. I couldn’t see her expression.
    “It’s okay,” she said. “I know how things are. They’re an ugly lot and they’re in a bad mood. But it just seems so ridiculous that we can be beaten by such a stupid thing. After the Salamen, I was sure I could talk to these people, sure I could get to know them. I was convinced that I could learn more about them in six weeks than an army of exobiologists in six years. I am convinced...but to come so close and not get the chance....”
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “It’s not your fault. I’m as worried as you are. They’re unpredictable because they’re so tense.”
    “Are they giving you any trouble?” I asked awkwardly.
    The question embarrassed her as much as it did me. “No,” she said. “They just look. If I couldn’t get used to that...where would I be? Even back on Earth, when I was fourteen....”
    Now she was eighteen. She’d grown into her rather gangly frame. She looked a lot less awkward. She was plain, but she wasn’t unattractive.
    “It’s not your last chance,” I said quietly. “The next world has alien indigenes, too. And after that...if all goes well....”
    “If,” she said. She said it very flatly, very bitterly.
    “You’re afraid, aren’t you?” I said. “Afraid of your talent...burning out.”
    She turned on her side to look at me, as if astonished by my perception. She was used to knowing what other people thought. She wasn’t used to them knowing what she was thinking.
    “How...?” she began.
    She stopped, because she could see what I was thinking. Put into words, it was something like: I’m not a fool. Even I’m not totally insensitive.
    “They do, you know,” she murmured. “They always do.”
    “Maybe people just learn to hide them,” I said.
    “And maybe they learn to destroy them,” she said, softly. “To save themselves.
    “Is that what you’d like to do?”
    “No. It’s the last thing in the world I’d like to do. I don’t believe the thesis. I suspect that talents have to die, because if they don’t....”
    “...people go crazy,” I finished for her. “Not necessarily. Nobody knows.”
    “I know,” she said, in a fierce whisper. “When you’re a child, it doesn’t matter. A child is outside the adult social world...self-involved, self-possessed. All children are mad, by adult criteria. But as they grow up, we expect them to become sane. How can you take your place in the adult world when you can read minds? When so much depends on rules and conventions and ethics and self-concealment...how can there be any place in a world like that for something like me?”
    “We’ve adjusted,” I said. “Aboard the ship. Even me. It’s four and a half years now. Maybe I took a long time. But I’ve adjusted now. We all have.”
    “The ship’s a microcosm,” she said. “Not a world. It’s just six people, forced to live so close to one another that there can’t be any such thing as privacy. We all know one another’s souls inside out. What does a little thought-reading matter? But in the real world...in the complex world of millions of people, where no one knows anyone except perhaps inside marriage, and maybe not then...I’m outside. I’m an offense against life itself. As a child, I was a freak...but as a person, passing myself off as a person....”
    “Stop it,” I said.
    She curled up a little, as though her body were instinctively seeking a fetal position which it could no longer quite accomplish. Her eyes were still on my face.
    “Do you know what I believe?” she said, in a strange tone that didn’t quite belong to her voice. “I believe that talents vanish like magic with virginity. The moment I initiate myself into the human race, it’ll be gone just like that!”
    I looked away. “You can’t believe everything,” I said, trying to find a way to veer away from the subject.