Strangers

into military, economic, and political power. So if the government knew it had a virus that conferred these powers, it would not expose a group of ordinary people like us. Not in a million years. That blessing would be reserved for those already in positions of high authority, for the elite. I agree with Dom: I find the red-cloud-of-virus theory quite fascinating… though unlikely. However, if we were contaminated by such a thing, the side-effect was unknown to the government."
        In light of what Ernie had said, everyone was looking at Brendan and Dom with a new appreciation composed equally of awe, uneasiness, wonder, respect, and fear. Ginger saw both the priest and the writer squirm with the exhilarating yet frightening realization that they might have within them the potential for superhuman power, a potential that, if fulfilled, would forever separate them from the rest of mankind.
        "No," Dom said, starting to get up in protest, then sitting back down as if he did not think his legs would support him. "No, no. You're not right, Ginger. I'm no superman, no wizard, no damn… freak. If you were right, I'd feel it. I'd know it, Ginger."
        Brendan Cronin, equally shaken, said, "I've thought that somehow I've been the vehicle for the healing of Emmy and Winton. I've thought that something - not God, perhaps, but something - is working through me. I never thought of myself as the actual healer. Listen, I was under the impression we'd already decided the toxic-spill story was entirely a fake, a cover, that what happened to us wasn't an accident of any kind, neither chemical nor biological, but something altogether different."
        Jack and Jorja and Faye and Ned started talking at the same time. The noise level rose so loud that little Marcie frowned in her sleep, and Ginger said, "Wait, wait, wait a minute. There's no point discussing it because we can't prove there was such a virus any more than we can prove there wasn't one. Not yet. But maybe we can prove the other part."
        "What do you mean?" Sandy Sarver asked.
        Ginger said, "Maybe we can prove Dom and Brendan have the power. Not how they got it, but just that they have it."
        Dom was incredulous. "How?"
        "We'll set up a test," Ginger said.
        

        
        Dom was absolutely certain that it would not work, that they were wasting time, that the whole idea was foolish.
        Yet he was also scared that it would work, and that the proof of his power would condemn him to the condition of a freak or at least to a life forever closed to ordinary human relationships. If he possessed godlike power, no one would ever regard him without wonder and fear. In even the most relaxed or intimate moments with friends or lovers, their awareness of his extraordinary gifts would intrude, either overtly or in an unspoken subtext. Others, perhaps most, would envy or hate him.
        The unfairness of his predicament grated on him. For most of his thirty-five years, he had been shy and ineffectual, condemned to a drab existence by his timidity. Then he had changed, and for fifteen months, until his sleepwalking began last October, he'd been outgoing. Now, that brief, wonderful season of normality might be passing. If the test that Ginger outlined were to prove Dom had somehow acquired psychic powers, he would be isolated again, not by his own sense of inferiority, as before, but by everyone else's uneasy awareness of his superiority.
        The test. Dom hoped to God he failed.
        He and Brendan Cronin were sitting by themselves at the long table, one at each end. Jorja Monatella had put her slumbering daughter in a booth, and the girl had not awakened. The adults - all seven, including Jorja - stood in a semicircle around the table, back a couple of paces, giving Dom and Brendan space to concentrate free of distraction.
        A salt shaker stood on the table in front of Dom. Ginger's test required that he concentrate on moving the object without touching it. "Just an inch," she had said. "If you can evoke just the slightest perceptible motion in the shaker, we'll know you've got the power."
        At the far end of the three joined tables, a pepper shaker stood in front of Brendan Cronin. The priest was staring at the small glass cylinder as intently as Dom was staring at his own shaker, and his round freckled face was filled with a foreboding only marginally less grim than Dom's. Although Brendan