me.

I smiled at him gratefully; he was the only member of my family who really seemed to like me in spite of my handicap. "It won't work, Tim. I know you're trying to be kind, but—"

"He's not saying it just to be kind," my mother put in. "He means it. Not that I want to arouse false hopes, Kevin," she added with grim scrupulousness. "Tim's awfully young yet and I wouldn't trust his extracurricular prognostications too far."

Nonetheless, I couldn't help feeling a feeble renewal of old hopes. After all, young or not, Tim was a hell of a good prognosticator; he wouldn't have risen so rapidly to the position he held in the Weather Bureau if he hadn't been pretty near tops in foreboding.

Mother smiled sadly at my thoughts, but I didn't let that discourage me. As Danny had said, she knew but she didn't really understand. Nobody, for all of his or her psi power, really understood me.

Breakfast was finally over and the rest of my family dispersed to their various jobs. Father simply took his briefcase and disappeared—he was a traveling salesman and he had a morning appointment clear across the continent. The others, not having his particular gift, had to take the helibus to their different destinations. Mother, as I said, was a psychiatrist. Sylvia wrote advertising copy. Tim was a meteorologist. Dan was a junior executive in a furniture moving company and expected a promotion to senior rank as soon as he achieved a better mental grip on pianos.

Only I had no job, no profession, no place in life. Of course there were certain menial tasks a psi-negative could perform, but my parents would have none of them—partly for my sake, but mostly for the sake of their own community standing.

"We don't need what little money Kev could bring in," my father always said. "I can afford to support my family. He can stay home and take care of the house."

And that's what I did. Not that there was much to do except call a techno whenever one of the servomechanisms missed a beat. True enough, those things had to be watched mighty carefully because, if they broke down, it sometimes took days before the repair and/or replacement robots could come. There never were enough of them because ours was a constructive society. Still, being a machine-sitter isn't very much of a career. And every function that wasn't the prerogative of a machine could be done ten times more quickly and efficiently by some member of my family than I could do it. If I went ahead and did something anyway, they would just do it all over again when they got home.

So I had nothing to do all day. I had a special dispensation to take books out of the local Archives, because I was a deficient and couldn't receive the tellie programs. Almost everybody on Earth was telepathic to some degree and could get the amplified projections even if he couldn't transmit or receive with his natural powers. But I got nothing. I had to derive all my recreation from reading, and you can get awfully tired of books, especially when they're all at least a hundred years old and written by primitives. I could borrow sound tapes, but they also bored me after a while.

I thought maybe I could develop a talent for composing or painting, which would classify me as a telesensitive—artistic ability being considered as the oldest, if least important, psi power—but I couldn't even do anything like that.

About all there was left for me was to take long walks. Athletics were out of the question; I couldn't compete with psi-boys and they didn't want to compete with me. All the people in the neighborhood knew me and were nice to me, but I didn't need to be a 'path to tell what they were saying to one another when I hove into sight. "There's that oldest Faraday boy. Pity, such a talented family, to have a defective."

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