Firestarter(82)

He wasn't claustrophobic, but he didn't like being closed up for long periods of time. It made him nervous, even with the drugs. It was a low nervousness, usually evidenced by long sighs and periods of apathy. He had indeed asked to go out. He wanted to see the sun again, and green grass.

"Yes," he said softly to Pynchot. "I have expressed an interest in going out."

But he didn't get to go out...

The volunteer was nervous at first, undoubtedly expecting Andy to make him stand on his head and cluck like a chicken or something equally ridiculous. He was a football fan. Andy got the man, whose name was Dick Albright, to bring him up to date on the previous season-who had made it to the playoffs and how they went, who had won the Super Bowl.

Albright kindled. He spent the next twenty minutes reliving the entire season, gradually losing his nervousness. He was up to the lousy reffing that had allowed the Pats to triumph over the Dolphins in the AFC championship game when Andy said, "Have a glass of water, if you want. You must be thirsty."

Albright glanced up at him. "Yeah, I am kinda thirsty. Say... am I talkin too much? Is it screwin up their tests, do you think?" "No, I don't think so," Andy said. He watched Dick Albright pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher.

"You want some?" Albright asked. "No, I'll pass," Andy said, and suddenly gave a hard push. "Have some ink in it, why don't you?" Albright looked up at him, then reached for the bottle of "ink." He picked it up, looked at it, and put it back down again. "Put ink in it? You must be crazy."

Pynchot grinned as much after the test as before it, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all. Andy was not pleased either. When he had pushed out at Albright there had been none of that sideslipping sensation... that curious feeling of doubling that usually accompanied the push. And no headache. He had concentrated all of his will toward suggesting to Albright that putting ink in his water would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and Albright had made a perfectly reasonable reply: that Andy was nuts. In spite of all the pain it had caused him, he had felt a touch of panic at the thought the talent night have deserted him.

"Why do you want to keep it under wraps?" Pynchot asked him. He lit a Chesterfield and grinned. "I don't understand you, Andy. What good does it do you?"

"For the tenth time," Andy had replied, "I wasn't holding back. I wasn't faking. I pushed him as hard as I could. Nothing happened, that's all." He wanted his pill. He felt depressed and nervous. All the colors seemed too bright, the light too strong, voices too loud. It was better with the pills. With the pills, his useless outrage over what had happened and his loneliness for Charlie and his worry over what might be happening to her-these things faded back and became manageable. "I'm afraid I don't believe that," Pynchot said, and grinned. "Think it over, Andy. We're not asking you to make someone walk off" a cliff" or shoot himself in the head. I guess you didn't want that walk as badly as you thought you did."

He stood up as if to go. "Listen," Andy said, unable to keep the desperation entirely out of his voice, "I'd like one of those pills."

"Would you?" Pynchot said. "Well, it might interest you to know that I'm lightening your dosage... just in case it's the Thorazine that's interfering with your ability." His grin bloomed anew. "Of course, if your ability suddenly came back..."

"There are a couple of things you should know," Andy told him. "First, the guy was nervous, expecting something. Second, he wasn't all that bright. It's a lot harder to push old people and people with low or low-normal IQs. Bright people go easier."

"Is that so?" Pynchot said.

"Yes."

"Then why don't you push me into giving you a pill right now? My tested IQ is one-fifty-five."

Andy had tried-with no results at all.

Eventually he had got his walk outside, and eventually they had increased the dosage of his medication again as well-after they became convinced that he really wasn't faking, that he was, in fact, trying desperately hard to use the push, with no success at all. Quite independently of each other, both Andy and Dr. Pynchot began to wonder if he hadn't tipped himself over permanently in the run that had taken him and Charlie from New York to Albany County Airport to Hastings Glen, if he hadn't simply used the talent up. And both of them wondered if it wasn't some kind of psychological block. Andy himself came to believe that either the talent was really gone or it was simply a defense mechanism: his mind refusing to use the talent because it knew it might kill him to do so. He hadn't forgotten the numb places on his cheek and neck, and the bloodshot eye.

Either way, it amounted to the same thing-a big goose-egg. Pynchot, his dreams of covering himself with glory as the first man to get provable, empirical data on psychic mental domination now flying away, came around less and less often.

The tests had continued through May and June first more volunteers and then totally unsuspecting test subjects. Using the latter was not precisely ethical, as Pynchot was the first to admit, but some of the first tests with LSD hadn't been precisely ethical, either. Andy marveled that by equating these two wrongs in his mind, Pynchot seemed to come out the other side feeling that everything was okay. It didn't matter, because Andy had no success pushing any of them.