owing. I'd be playing hide-and-seek, and I
could see the places where the other kids were hiding just as plainly
as I could see my own surroundings. Or I'd be worrying over the
answers to an exam question, and I'd know what somebody in the back of
the room had decided to write down, or what the teacher was expecting
us to write. Not always--but it happened often enough so that it
bothered me, just the way it does now when I answer a question before
it's been asked, or know what the driver ahead of me is going to do a
split second before he does it, or win a bridge game because I can see
everybody else's hand through his own eyes, almost."

"Has it always ... bothered you, Lucilla?"

"No-o-o-o." She drew the word out, considering, trying to think when
it was that she hadn't felt uneasy about the unexpected moments of
perceptiveness. When she was very little, perhaps. She thought of the
tiny, laughing girl in the faded snaps of the old album--and suddenly,
inexplicably, she was that self, moving through remembered rooms,
pausing to collect a word from a boyish father, a thought from a
pretty young mother. Reluctantly, she closed her eyes against that
distant time. "Way back," she said, "when I didn't know any better, I
just took it for granted that sometimes people talked to each other
and that sometimes they passed thoughts along without putting them
into words. I was about six, I guess, when I found out it wasn't so."
She slipped into her six-year-old self as easily as she had donned the
younger Lucilla. This time she wasn't in a house, but high on a
hillside, walking on springy pine needles instead of prosaic carpet.

"Talk," Dr. Andrews reminded her, his voice so soft that it could
almost have come from inside her own mind.

"We were picnicking," she said. "A whole lot of us. Somehow, I
wandered away from the others...." One minute the hill was bright
with sun, and the next it was deep in shadows and the wind that had
been merely cool was downright cold. She shivered and glanced around
expecting her mother to be somewhere near, holding out a sweater or
jacket. There was no one at all in sight. Even then, she never thought
of being frightened. She turned to retrace her steps. There was a big
tree that looked familiar, and a funny rock behind it, half buried in
the hillside. She was trudging toward it, humming under her breath,
when the worry thoughts began to reach her. (... only a little creek
so I don't think she