It\'s getting worse," she said miserably to the pale blue ceiling. "The phone didn\'t ring this morning—it couldn\'t have—but I answered it." Dr. Andrews said nothing at all. She let her eyes flicker sidewise, but he was outside her range of vision. "I don\'t LIKE having you sit where I can\'t see you," she said crossly. "Freud may have thought it was a good idea, but I think it\'s a lousy one." She clenched her hands and stared at nothing. The silence stretched thinner and thinner, like a balloon blown big, until the temptation to rupture it was too great to resist. "I didn\'t see the truck this morning. Nor hear it. There was no reason at all for me to slow down and pull over."

"You might be dead if you hadn\'t. Would you like that better?"

The matter-of-fact question was like a hand laid across Lucilla\'s mouth. "I don\'t want to be dead," she admitted finally. "Neither do I want to go on like this, hearing words that aren\'t spoken and bells that don\'t ring. When it gets to the point that I pick up a phone just because somebody\'s thinking...." She stopped abruptly.

"I didn\'t quite catch the end of that sentence," Dr. Andrews said.

"I didn\'t quite finish it. I can\'t."

"Can\'t? Or won\'t? Don\'t hold anything back, Lucilla. You were saying that you picked up the phone just because somebody was thinking...." He paused expectantly. Lucilla reread the ornate letters on the framed diploma on the wall, looked critically at the picture of Mrs. Andrews—whom she\'d met—and her impish daughter—whom she hadn\'t—counted the number of pleats in the billowing drapes, ran a tentative finger over the face of her wristwatch, straightened a fold of her skirt ... and could stand the silence no longer.

"All right," she said wearily. "The girl at Karry Karton thought about talking to me, and I heard my phone ring, even though the bell was disconnected. G.G. thought about needing backup material for the conference and I went to the library. The truck driver thought about warning people and I got out of his way. So I can read people\'s minds—some people\'s minds, some of the time, anyway ... only there\'s no such thing as telepathy. And if I\'m not telepathic, then...." She caught herself in the brink of time and bit back the final word, fighting for self-control.

"Then what?" The peremptory question toppled Lucilla\'s defenses.

"I\'m crazy," she said. Speaking the word released all the others dammed up behind it. "Ever since I can remember, things like this have happened—all at once, in the middle of doing something or saying something, I\'d find myself thinking about what somebody else was doing or saying. Not thinking—knowing. I\'d be playing hide-and-seek, and I could see the places where the other kids were hiding just as plainly as I could see my own surroundings. Or I\'d be worrying over the answers to an exam question, and I\'d know what somebody in the back of the room had decided to write down, or what the teacher was expecting us to write. Not always—but it happened often enough so that it bothered me, just the way it does now when I answer a question before it\'s been asked, or know what the driver ahead of me is going to do a split second before he does it, or win a bridge game because I can see everybody else\'s hand through his own eyes, almost."

"Has it always ... bothered you, Lucilla?"

"No-o-o-o." She drew the word out, considering, trying to think when it was that she hadn\'t felt uneasy about the unexpected moments of perceptiveness. When she was very little, pe............