Starblood

nothing. His slightly above average IQ score had been garnered solely on that native ability. Excitement at the project grew until Timothy no longer reached a meaningful IQ of 250. It was now eighteen months since he had lifted the spoon without hands, and he was very nearly devouring books, switching from topic to topic, from two weeks of advanced physics texts to a month of nineteenth-century British literature. The military didn't care, for they did not expect him to be a one-field expert, merely educated and conversant At the end of eighteen months, he was both these things. The military turned to other plans…
    They coached his psionic abilities carefully. There were dreams in military minds, of Timothy destroying the entire Asian Army with one psionic burst. But dreams are only dreams. The fact was soon evident that Timothy's psi powers were severely limited. The heaviest thing he could lift was a spoon full of applesauce, and his radius of ability was only a hundred feet. As a superweapon, he was something of a washout.
    The generals were disappointed: after the initial paralysis wore off, they opted to dissect Timothy to see what they could discover of his ability.
    Luckily for him, the war ended.
    The Bio-Chem people came up with the ultimate weapon. They released a virus on the Asian mainland at roughly the same time the army was discovering Timothy's limits. Before the generals could act on him, the virus had destroyed approximately half of the Asian male population—it was structured to affect only certain chromosome combinations that occurred only in Mongolians—and had induced the enemy to a reluctant surrender.
    With peace, the wombs were put under the administration of the Bio-Chem people, and the project was dissolved.
    But the scientists were still fascinated with Timothy. For three weeks, he was exhaustively tested and retested by his new masters. He overheard their discussions about "What his brain might look like…"
    It was a rugged three weeks.
    In the end a leak reached the press and the story of the horribly deformed mutant who could lift spoons without touching them was a three-day sensation. The Veterans' Bureau, the largest bureau of the now peace-oriented government, stepped into the uproar and took control of him. Senator Kilby announced that the government was going to "rehabilitate" the young man, provide him with servo-hands and a grav-plate system for mobility.
    He was a three-day sensation again. And so was the politically wise senator who took credit for his rehabilitation…

CHAPTER 1
    Timothy stood on the patio that jutted beyond the cliff and watched a flock of birds settling into the big green pines which spread thickly down the mountainside. He was fascinated by nature because it contained two qualities he did not—an intricacy of purpose and general perfection. As most normal men are intrigued by freaks, so Timothy was intrigued by the nature of normalcy. He directed his left servo-hand to pull apart the branches obscuring his view of a particularly fine specimen. The six-fingered prostho swept away from him on the grav-plates that cored its palm, shot forty feet down the embankment to the offending branch, and gently pulled it aside so as not to disturb the birds. But the birds were too aware: they flew.
    Using his limited psionic powers, Ti reached into the two hundred micro-miniature switches of the control module buried in the globe of the grav-plate system that capped his truncated legs. The switches, operated by psi power, in turn maneuvered his hands and moved him about as he wished. He recalled his left servo now that the bird had gone. It rushed back to him and floated at his side.
    He looked at the watch strapped to the servo and was surprised to find that it was past time for his usual morning chat with Taguster. He flipped the microminiature switches and floated around and through the patio doors, into the somewhat plush living-room of his house.
    The house was the pivotal spot of his life, giving him comfort when he was depressed, companionship when he was lonely, a sense of accomplishment when his life seemed hollow. He had built it with money earned from his two volumes of autobiography, a proud monument built over the ruins of a Revolutionary War, pro-British secret supplies' cellar. It was maintained by the revenues from
Enterstat
, the first stat newspaper devoted to gossip and entertainment, a project launched successfully with the book monies.
    He