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"I don't think I was kidding myself, Laney."
"Neither do I. You keep saying something was strange about the guards' eyes. Was there anything strange about Polly's eyes?"
"What are you getting at?"
"You claim every time you're getting ready to lose your virginity to a girl, she drops you. Why? You aren't ugly. You probably don't have the habit of being grossly impolite. You weren't with me. You bathe often enough. Was there something about Polly's eyes?"
"Dammit, Laney ... Eyes." Something changed in Polly's face. She seemed to be listening to something only she could hear. She certainly wasn't looking at anything; her eyes went past him and through, him, and they looked blind ...
"She looked abstracted. What do you want me to say? She looked like she was thinking of something then she walked away."
"Was it sudden, this loss of interest? Did she--"
"Laney, what do you think? I drove her away deliberately?" Matt jumped to his feet. He couldn't take any more; he was wires stretched on a bone frame, every wire about to break. Nobody had ever so assaulted his privacy! He had never imagined that a woman could share his bed, listen in sympathy to all the agony of the secrets that had shaped his soul, and then spill everything she knew into a detailed, clinical roundtable discussion! He felt like one who has been disassembled for the organ banks, who, still aware, watches a host of doctors probing and prodding his separated i
And he was about to say so, in no mild terms, when he saw that nobody was looking at him.
Nobody was looking at him.
Laney was staring into the artificial fire; Hood was looking at Laney; Harry Kane was in his Thinker position. None of them were really seeing anything, at least not anything there in the room. Each wore an abstracted look.
"One problem," Harry Kane said dreamily. "How the blazes are we going to free the rest of us, when only four of us escaped?" He glanced around at his inattentive audience, then went back to contemplating his navel from the inside.
Matt felt the hair stir on his head. Harry Kane had looked right at him, but he certainly hadn't seen Matt Keller. And there was something very peculiar about his eyes.
Like a man in a wax museum, Matt bent to look into Harry Kane's eyes.
Harry jumped as if he'd been shot. "Where the blazes did you come from?" He stared as if Matt had dropped from the ceiling Then he said, "Umm ... oh! You did it."
There wasn't a doubt of it. Matt nodded. "You all suddenly lost interest in me."
"What about our eyes?" Hood seemed about to spring at him, he was so intense.
"Something. I don't know. I was bending down to see, when"--Matt shrugged--"it wore off."
Harry Kane used a word your publisher will cut.
Hood said, "Suddenly? I don't remember its being sudden."
"What do you remember?" Matt asked.
"Well, nothing, really. We were talking about eyes was it about Polly? Sure, Polly. Matt, did it bother you to talk about it?"
Matt growled in his throat.
"Then that's why you did whatever you did. You didn't want to be noticed."
Probably.
Hood rubbed his hands briskly together. "So. We know you've got something, anyway, and it's under your control. Your subconscious control. Well!" Hood became a professor looking around at his not-too-bright class. "What questions are still unanswered?
"For one, what do the eyes have to do with anything? For another, why was a guard eventually able to shoot you and store you away? For a third, why would you use your ability to drive girls away?"
"Mist Demons, Hood! There's no conceivable reason--'
"Keller."
The voice was a quiet command. Harry Kane was back in Thinker position on the couch, staring off into space. "You said Polly looked abstracted. Did we look abstracted a moment ago?"
"When you forgot about me? Yah."
"Do I look abstracted now?"
"Yah. Wait a minute." Matt stood up and walked around Harry, examining him from different sides. He should have looked like a man deep in thought. Thinker position: chin on fist, elbow on knee; face lowered, almost scowling; motionless; eyes hooded ... Hooded? But clearly visible.
"No, you don't. There's something wrong."
"Your eyes."
"Round and round we go," Harry said disgustedly. "Well, get down and look at my eyes, for the Mist Demons' sake!"
Matt knelt on the indoor grass and looked up into Harry's eyes. No inspiration came. A wrongness there, but where? ... He thought of Polly on Friday night, when they stood immersed in noise and elbows, and talked nose-to-nose. They'd touched from time to time, half accidentally, hands and shoulders brushing ... He'd felt the warm blood beating in his neck ... and suddenly--
"Too big," said Matt. "Your pupils are too big. When somebody really isn't interested in what's going on around him, the pupils are smaller."
"What about Polly's eyes?" Hood probed. "Dilated or contracted?"
"Contracted. Very small. And so were the guards' eyes, the ones who came for me this morning." He remembered how surprised they'd been when he yanked on the handcuffs, the handcuffs that still dangled from his wrists. They hadn't been interested in him; they'd merely unlocked the chains from their own wrists. And when they'd looked at him--"That's it. That's why their eyes looked so fu
Hood sighed in relief. "Then that's all of it," he said, and got up. "Well, I think I'll see how Lydia's doing with di
"Come back here." Harry Kane's voice was low and murderous. Hood burst out laughing.
"Stop that cackling," said Harry Kane. "Whatever Keller's got, we need it. Talk!"
Whatever Keller's got, we need-it. Matt felt he ought to protest. He didn't intend to be used by the Sons of Earth. But he couldn't interrupt now.
"It's a very limited form of telepathy," said Jay Hood. "And because it is so very limited, it's probably more dependable than more general forms. Its target is so much less ambiguous." He smiled. "We really ought to have a new name for it. Telepathy doesn't apply, not quite."
Three people waited patiently but implacably.
"Matt's mind," said Hood, "is capable of controlling the nerves and muscles which dilate and contract the iris of another man's eye." And he smiled, waiting for their response.
"So what?" asked Harry Kane. "What good is that?"
"You don't understand? No, I suppose you don't. It's more in my field. Do you know anything about motivational research?"
Three heads waggled No.
"The science was ba
"It turns out that if you show a man something and measure his pupil with a camera, you can tell whether it interests him. You can show him pictures of his country's political leaders, in places where there are two or more factions, and his eyes will dilate for the leader of his own. Take him aside for an hour and talk to him, persuade
to change his political views, and his pupils will dilate for the other guy. Show him pictures of pretty girls, and the girl he calls prettiest will have dilated pupils. He doesn't know it. He only knows she looks interested. In him.
"I wonder," said Hood, smiling dreamily at himself. Some people love to lecture. Hood was one. "Could that be the reason the most expensive restaurants are always dark? A couple comes in, they look at each other across a di