A Darkness in My Soul

tried to readjust my judgment, tried to visualize him as a grandfather. But it was not so. He was a child.
        There was the glint of babyhood close behind that ruined countenance. His voice crackled like papyrus unrolled for the first time in millennia, and he gripped the chair as the words came, and he squinted his already squinted eyes, and he said, "You're the one." It was an accusation.
        "You're the one they sent for."
        For the first time in many years, I was afraid. I was not certain what terrified me, but it was a deep and relentless uneasiness, far more threatening than The Fear which rose in me most nights when I considered my origins and the pocket of the plastic womb from which I came.
        "You," the child said again.
        "Who is he?" I asked the assembled military men.
        No one spoke immediately. As if they wanted to be sure the freak in the chair was finished.
        He wasn't.
        "I don't like you," he said. "You're going to be sorry you came here. I'm going to see to that."
        

    II
        
        "That's the situation," Harry said, leaning back in his chair for the first time since he had taken me aside to explain the job. He was still nervous. His clear blue eyes were having trouble staying with mine, and he sought specks on the walls and scars on the furniture to draw his attention.
        The child-ancient's eyes, on the other hand, never left me. They squinted like burning coals sparking beneath rotted vegetation. I could feel the hatred smoldering there, hatred not just for me (though there was surely that), but for everyone, everything. There was no particle of his world which did not draw the freak's contempt and loathing. He, more so than I, was an outcast of the wombs. Once again, the doctors who made their living here and the congressmen who had supported the project since its inception could gloat: "Artificial Creation is a Benefit to the Nation." It had produced me. More than eighteen years later, it had come up with this warped super-genius who was no more than three years old but who appeared to be a relic. Two successes in a quarter of a century of operation.
        For the government, that's a winner.
        "I don't know if I can do it," I said at last.
        "Why not?" asked the uniformed hulk the others called General Morsfagen. He was a chiseled granite man with exaggerated shoulders and a chest too large for anything but tailored shirts. Wasp-waisted, with the small feet of a boxer. Hands to bend iron bars in circus acts.
        "I don't know what to expect. He has a different sort of mind. Sure, I've esped army staff, the people who work here at AC, FBI agents, the whole mess. And I've unerringly turned over the traitors and potential security risks.
        But this just doesn't scan like that."
        "You don't have to do any sorting," Morsfagen snapped, his thin lips making like a turtle bill. "I thought this had been made clear. He can formulate theories in areas as useful as physics and chemistry to others as useless as theology. But each time we drag the damn thing out of him, he leaves out some vital piece of it. We've threatened the little freak. We've tried bribing him. The trouble is, he has no fear or ambition." He had almost said "tortured" for "threatened" but was a good enough self-censor to change words without a pause. "You simply go into his head and make sure he doesn't hold anything back."
        "How much did you say?" I asked.
        "A hundred thousand poscreds an hour."
        It pained him to say that.
        "Double that," I said. For many men, the single hundred thou was more than a year's salary in these time of inflation.
        "What? Absurd!"
        He was breathing heavily, but the other generals didn't even flinch. I esped each of them and discovered that, among other things, the child had given them an almost completed design for a faster-than-light engine which would make star travel possible. For the rest of that theory alone, a million an hour was not ridiculous. I got my two hundred big ones with an option to demand more if the work proved more demanding than I anticipated.
        "Without your shyster, you'd be working for room and board," Morsfagen said.
        He had an ugly face.
        "Without your brass medals, you'd be a street-gang punk," I replied, smiling the famous Simeon Kelly smile.
        He wanted to hit me.
        His fists made flesh