James Blish Jack of Eagles

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were good that you d use it to get away from the PRS. Without it, your chances
looked slim but there is always an element of uncertainty in precognition, and
we couldn t be sure whether or not we were giving the PRS something with which
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they could do irreparable harm. But now it appears that we needn t have
worried; they used it only for what we told them it was good for, and it never
even occurred to them that it might be adjustable. They re inherently
incapable of scientific thinking every time I think of that load of lab junk
they ve collected over the river it gets funnier.
Who, Danny said, iswe? I ve told my story. You tell me yours.
Gladly, Sean said. Real psi-men not those ceremonious criminals at the
PRS are loosely organized all over the world. Our main purpose is research;
there s a lot we don t understand yet about the serial universe, I assure you.
Secondarily, we keep a close eye on people like the PRS members, people who
develop some small segment or another of the parapsychological spectrum and
put is to bad uses.
The PRS for instance, has been playing the market; they were the ones who
rigged Wheat into its present position the company itself is innocent, for a
wonder and it was their manipulations which gave your mind the first big jolt
toward developing its psi powers, though they re unaware of that. They also,
control, absolutely, the gambling syndicate you tangled with, and a number of
other rackets. They also own most of Consolidated Warfare Service, the big
Zurich munitions outfit, and a lot of lost tempers at diplomatic meetings are
traceable to them. They ve evolved their elaborate ritual for protecting
themselves because they dread any rivalry in the field.
Do they know of your group?
Yes, and they fear it; but they follow a hands-off policy with us, partly
from fear and partly because we represent no threat to their operations most
of the time. We intervene only when it s necessary to save lives, which they
know as well as we do. Their adepts can detect the development of psi powers
in any individual, and, if possible, they run that individual down and enlist
him or, in the rare case where the new man has scruples, they kill him.
Much of the time we ve been able to prevent these killings, but we have a
firm law against interfering until such an individual has won his way to full
psi power under his own steam. If he still needs help after that and
ordinarily he doesn t we help him. But not before.
That s a hard rule, Sean. It s the helpless victims that need the aid more.
Sean nodded. That s perfectly true. One of the reasons they don t get it
from us, most of the time, is that we haven t the manpower to be watchdogging
the PRS day and night, and when we do muscle in, we usually need the help of
the victim. If he s unequipped to give it, our hands are tied; so we have had
to be tough-minded about it and give up going after such people at all. In
addition, believe it or not, survivors of the PRS ordeal are almost our sole
source of recruits for our own group; they make up the only people we can be
perfectly sure of. Otherwise we have to go through our regular testing
procedure, and that takes so many years that we d be whittled down to nothing
if we depended upon it alone.
You ll remember, for instance, my infinity of time argument, where I tried
to sell you on the idea that anything odd that happened to you was to be laid
at the door of an extreme violation of chance. That was one of our tests. The
argument is ridiculous, but itsounds reasonable, and a man who can t see
through it will never make a good psi-man. Being a good psi-man takes
intelligence and lots of it. It also takes considerable independence of mind,
since the psi-man has to live with the knowledge that he s vastly different
from most of his fellow men, at least at present; he has to be comfortable
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