Dream Man
“Maybe.” Dane didn’t want to commit himself to anything.
“Ah, I see. Skepticism. But you’re intrigued enough by what she told you to take a flight to see me. It’s okay, Detective; skepticism is not only expected, it’s healthy. I’d worry about you if you automatically believed everything you’re told. For one thing, you’d be terrible in your job.”
Dane firmly returned the conversation to the subject. “About the kidnapping. There was a newspaper article saying that she’d been beaten.” Ruthlessly he kept himself from imagining details; he’d seen too many results from beatings, and didn’t want to picture Marlie in that condition. “There’s been nothing else about her since then. Are you saying the injuries were so severe—”
“No, not that at all,” Professor Ewell interrupted. “I don’t mean to downplay the severity of her injuries, but she was fully recovered from them well before she started talking again. In this case, it was the mental trauma that did her the greatest harm.”
“What happened, exactly?”
The professor looked thoughtful. “How much do you know about parapsychology?”
“I know how to spell it.”
“I see. From that, I take it that most of your information about it is gleaned from television shows and fortune-tellers in county fairs.”
“Just about.”
“Well, discard all of what you think you know. I’ve always thought that the basis of it was very simple: electrical energy. Every action and every thought uses electrical energy. This energy is detectable. Some people are sensitive to bee stings; others are sensitive to energy. There are degrees of sensitivity, with some people being only mildly sensitive and a very few being ultrasensitive. I don’t see why the issue has to be confused with hocus-pocus, though of course, there are charlatans who wouldn’t know psychic ability if it bit them on the ass—” The professor broke off, and gave Dane a sheepish look. “Sorry. My wife says I get carried away.”
She was right, too. Dane smiled. “I understand. Now, about Marlie—”
“Marlie is exceptional. Most people have some extrasensory ability, and call it hunches, gut instinct, mother’s intuition, whatever they’re comfortable with. Their degree of ability is mild. Some are a bit sharper than that. A few others are even more sensitive, to a degree that can be tested. And then there are the rare ones, like Marlie. She’s the most sensitive receptor I’ve ever seen. To give you a comparison, most people are biplanes, some few are Cessnas, and Marlie is a high-performance fighter jet.”
“You’ve tested her, of course?”
“My God, Marlie’s been tested almost continuously since she was four years old! She could be fractious even then,” he said fondly.
“What exactly are her—er, talents?”
“Mainly, she’s an empath.”
“A what?”
“Empath. She’s empathic. She feels others’ emotions, so much so that an ordinary drive on a crowded street could make her scream with frustration. All those feelings bombarding her, from all directions. She described it once as a blend of screams and static, at high volume. The biggest problem she had was controlling it, blocking it out so she could function normally.”
“You said mainly. What else does she do?”
“You said that as if she’s a trick pony,” the professor observed, his tone disapproving.
“No offense meant. I won’t lie and tell you that I’m buying all of this, but I’m interested.” And that was an understatement if he’d ever made one.
“You’ll come around,” Professor Ewell predicted with a certain amount of malicious satisfaction. “All of you do, once you’ve been around Marlie any length of time.”
“Who is ’all of you’?”
“Policemen. You’re the world’s most cynical people, but eventually you won’t be able to deny what she can do. Back to your question: She’s also a bit clairvoyant, though certainly not to the same degree that she’s empathic. She has to concentrate to block her empathic abilities, something she had never quite managed to completely do, while she has to concentrate to use her clairvoyance.”
“You mean she predicts that things will happen?”
“No, that’s precognitive.”
Dane rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache come on. “I don’t think I have all of this straight. I’ve always thought a clairvoyant is someone with a crystal ball, predicting the future.”
Professor Ewell laughed. “No, that’s a charlatan.”
“Gotcha. Okay, an empathic person is someone who receives and feels the emotions of other people.”
The professor nodded. “A clairvoyant senses distant objects, and is aware of events in distant places. A precognitive is someone who knows of events in the future. A telekinetic is someone who can move physical objects with the force of their minds.”
“Spoon benders.”
“Mostly charlatans.” The spoon benders were dismissed with a wave. “I won’t say that one or two don’t have telekinetic talent, but for the most part it’s just showmanship. None of the extrasensory abilities can be neatly categorized, because capability varies from person to person, just like reading ability.”
“And Marlie’s particular blend of talents made her good at finding people?”
“Mmmm. Extraordinary. Her empathy was so strong that, when she focused on one particular person, she would … well, she called them ’visions,’ but I’ve observed her during the events, and I would use a stronger word than that. A vision is something that can be easily interrupted. It was as if her mind would leave, though of course, it didn’t. But she would be totally taken over by the event, so completely in empathy with the subject that she was aware of nothing else. Terribly draining for her, of course. She would virtually collapse afterward. But while she was linked, she would observe enough about the surroundings to pinpoint the location, and she always managed to fight off the exhaustion long enough to pass the details along to the local law enforcement officers.”