The layout of the Center showed the nature of that relationship. We were on the inside of the fence, and they were on the outside. They were very much in control. In exchange for all the money, in exchange for the Center, in exchange for our very existence, we worked for them. They owned us, every single one of us.

"The kid," said Martha, "is a monster. I'm sorry to have to put it that way, but that's what he is. A monster."

"The kid," said Vince, "is a kid. And all kids are monsters."

"Not like this one. He's truly nasty."

"He'll grow out of it," said Snake.

"He refuses to study."

I said, "Motivate him."

"He disrupts the class."

"Apply peer pressure."

"And," Martha made her final point, "he's a terror with the girls."

"There you are," said Vince. "I knew he couldn't be all bad."

Sammy smiled, but did not look up from his work. We sat in his office waiting for our visitors from the Agency, Sammy at his desk, and the rest of us spread over couches and chairs. Sammy's work was a stack of requisition forms, and he checked each one carefully before putting his initials on it. He never had wanted to run the Center, never had wanted to have anything to do with administration, but now he had the job and he was doing his best with it. He had been happiest in the field when the five of us had worked as a team. We were all the same age, had come to the Center in the same year as children, and had grown up together with ties far tighter than actual kinship could have produced. Not that we were in any way alike. Sammy Warsaw, with his frizzy hair and his batwing ears, his sharp wit and keen intellect, was the first among equals. Vince Bonepart, big and black, had the profile of an Assyrian god and the body of an NFL linebacker. Martha Marino was everybody's Earth Mother, gentle to the bone, while Claudia, called Snake, was as slim as a boy and as daring as a wildcat. And then were was me, Ben Slade.

We rarely operated as a team anymore, and Sammy had called us in from independent assignments: me from Louisiana, Vince from his translation post at the U.N., and Snake from an interrogation in Seattle. Martha had not had to travel at all; she was on temporary assignment at the Center, teaching. We all took a turn at that once every year, working with the kids whose powers were the same as ours, but who still had to learn how to handle them. The Center had a staff of teachers for the normal curriculum, but it took a sensitive to teach another one how to live with the responsibility that went with the talent. I had always found it to be a rewarding experience, but Martha had caught a rough one with Little, and he was driving her up the wall.

"He's anything but little," she said to Vince. "He's only sixteen and he's almost as big as you are. And nobody calls him Amos anymore. Chicken Little, that's his name now."

"I like it, but why Chicken?"

"That's his favorite game. You know, going head-to-head with cars, first one to turn away is chicken. Well, Amos never turns. Never."

"Here in the Center? Where do they get the cars?"

Snake laughed. "Where did we get them when we were here?" She had a right to laugh. When we were kids, nobody was quicker or better than Snake at lifting a jeep from the motor pool.

"The other day he talked another kid into doing it with forklift trucks. Can you imagine two forklifts going head-to-head? It was like a pair of saber-toothed tigers."

More laughter.

"You can laugh," said Martha, her voice troubled, "but I'm really worried about the boy. I'm beginning to think he's not right in the head."

The laughter reached a new level. "Did I hear you right?" I asked. "Not right in the head? Do you remember what you were like when you came here? Do you remember what we all were like?"

The laughter stopped in sympathy for Martha. There was nothing she could say in answer to those questions, although she knew the answers well enough. Before coming to the Center, we all had been quite mad.

The Center had found Martha in a home for retarded children in Omaha. She had been there for a year. She heard voices in her head that no one else could hear. When she heard the voices she went wild. She screamed for hours, she clawed her body, she soiled herself. When the Center found her she was under constant restraint and sedation. She was twelve years old.

The Center had found Vince tucked away in the corner of a drug-abuse program in Boston. Vince also heard the voices. His parents had abandoned him when he was seven, and after that he had lived in the streets. He had learned from his elders how to boost drunks and how to shoot smack. The smack kept the voices quiet. He was kicking when the Center found him, and the voices were back, filling his head with their howls. He was twelve years old.

The Center found Claudia in a religious commune in Idaho. The members of the group worshipped snakes. They also worshipped Claudia. When Claudia heard the voices she went into a trance and made hissing noises. That, to members of the commune, made her part of the godhead, a higher form of snake. They kept her in a cage and fed her what the snakes ate. When the Center found her she had not spoken a word for months, and she moved by slithering across the floor on her belly. She was twelve years old.

The Center found Sammy in an expensive sanitarium north of New York City. His parents had placed him there. He was catatonic, incapable of voluntary movement. He could not speak, and his limbs remained fixed in whatever position they were placed. His eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking. He had been that way since he first heard the voices. He was twelve years old.

The Center found me locked in the back bedroom of a shack in Freeman, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma line. The room had a bed, a chair, and a slop bucket. I was chained to the bed, and I was naked. My body was covered with old scars and fresh welts. The man I called my daddy said that the voices I heard were the tongues of the devil. He was a shade-tree mechanic and a part-time preacher, and he knew about devils. At the end of each day he whipped the devil out of me with a razor strop, and then prayed for my deliverance. When the Center found me I could not stand or sit, and my body was a festering wound. I was twelve years old.

That's what we had been, my generation at the Center, and other generations, before us and after, had come from the same sort of background: the abused, the imprisoned, the seemingly mad. At the Center we were cleansed, we were nourished, we were treated, we were loved, and we were taught how to live with the voices in our heads. They were the voices of the world around us. The lust of the satyr, the sloth of the slob, the greed of the avaricious, the jealousy of the discontented, the righteousness of the fanatic, the despair of the helpless, the flaring orange delight of the arsonist, and the screaming crimson of the psychopath-those were the voices that had howled around within our heads like winds in a cavern, and had blown us away into another world. It took time to learn how to live with those voices, and by the time we were sixteen most of us had managed it. Amos Little was one of the exceptions.

"I hate to say this," said Martha, and we all knew what was coming.

"Go ahead, spit it out," said Vince.

"He may be a deuce."

Nobody laughed at that. There was nothing funny about one of the kids turning out to be a deuce, a failed ace. It didn't happen very often, but it happened. A kid would come into the program with all the potential ability of a true sensitive, but the ability would never develop. A kid like that was left in limbo, neither a normal nor a sensitive, capable of limited communication, but useless in the field. There was nothing to do with a kid like that; he was in the system, and couldn't get out, but he could never truly be a part of it. He was a deuce, and around the Center the deuces were the hewers of wood and the haulers of water. I had known a few happy deuces, but I hadn't known many.