Card Trick by John Berryman (red scrolls of magic .TXT) 📕

told her. "Spade."

They could have heard that shriek clear to Keokuk. Good thing we were in a sound-proof laboratory.

I got her calmed down after a while. "It didn't happen!" she insisted, clutching at her temples.

"If you won't holler," I said. "I'll do it again. Remember, it's just a phenomenon, like osmosis."

"It is not!" she gasped.

But I did it for her. Ten times in a row. The cards changed under her fingers without moving.

"So it's not PC," I said.

"Oh, Tex, but what is it?"

"You agree it's real?"

Shari nodded. "It's real. You can do it, whatever it is. What is it?"

"TK," I told her. "Telekinesis."

"Nonsense," she said. "Are you trying to make me believe I wouldn't have felt the cards move if you'd snapped them out from under my fingers? I was pressing hard on them every time."

"I didn't move the cards," I explained.

"But you said it was telekinesis!"

"Sure. I just moved the molecules of pigment in the printing ink and reassembled them in the opposite cards. You didn't expect to feel molecular movement, did you?"

"No. Then it really happened?" I nodded. "What an incredible power!" she said. A glow of satisfaction spread over me. "Can you really test this molecular hypothesis?" she asked.

I told her of the hours of demonstrations I had made during the night. "The perception on scanning part of it goes on at some subconscious level, Shari," I said. "But we had evidence that it can be made completely conscious."

She shuddered and hugged her arms to herself. "I hate to say this to you," she said. "But you're a freak."

I took a deep breath and smiled. "Unique is the way the Grand Master puts it," I said, pleased with myself. "He says it has terrific possibilities." And then it hit me, that delicious thought that I was among the elect, that I always had been.

"What possibilities?" Shari demanded, recoiling from me. "Doing card tricks?"

"To name a few," I said. "They feel sure I can operate directly on the molecular chain in genes. This means we can alter heredity to suit ourselves. Next, why not rearrange the DNA molecule in a cancer? If you can change the genes in one cell, you can change them in another. Knock out the ability of cancerous cells to reproduce their own kind and the cancer disappears. A silly one: Maragon says I can be a one-man catalytic cracking station. Pipe a liquid through a tube within my TK range and I can make an equilibrium reaction run uphill as the stuff flows past me. How about a one-step operation to produce those rare drugs that now take forty-nine separate reactions?"

"This does have a significance for science," she admitted. "The genetic part is right down your alley. And it's not PC, is it?"

"Strictly TK," I told her. "You're the only PC in the family."

"Family?" She turned pink as I went around the desk after her. "I told you the answer was 'no.'"

"I have inside information," I said, pulling her to me. "One of the PC's up at the chapter house said this was what would happen."

She didn't fight my kiss more than a couple seconds. Then it was a pure case of self-preservation for me. This girl was a tiger. Looks can be awfully deceiving. But she broke away from me.

"Tex!" she gasped. "Stop, honey! Suppose somebody walks in."

"A PC like you never gets that kind of surprise," I lied valiantly.

"Am I?" she whispered. "Am I really a PC?"

"That's why you locked the door," I said. "Remember?"

THE END End of Project Gutenberg's Card Trick, by Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett