"Touch some of the others, quick!" my mother commanded, pushing astounded attendants away from stretchers.
I touched broken limbs and torn bodies and shattered heads, and they were whole again right away. Everybody in the room was looking at me in the way I had always dreamed of being looked at. Lucy was opening and shutting her beautiful mouth like a beautiful fish. In fact, the whole thing was just like a dream, except that I was awake. I couldn't have imagined all those horrors.
But the horrors soon weren't horrors any more. I began to find them almost pleasing; the worse a wound was, the more I appreciated it. There was so much more satisfaction, virtually an esthetic thrill, in seeing a horrible jagged tear smooth away, heal, not in days, as it would have done under the cure-all, but in seconds.
"Timothy was right," my mother said, her eyes filled with tears, "and I was wrong ever to have doubted. You have a gift, son—" and she said the word son loud and clear so that everybody could hear it—"the greatest gift of all, that of healing." She looked at me proudly. And Lucy and the others looked at me as if I were a god or something.
I felt ... well, good.
"I wonder why we never thought of healing as a potential psi-power," my mother said to me later, when I was catching a snatch of rest and she was lighting cigarettes and offering me cups of coffee in an attempt to make up twenty-six years of indifference, perhaps dislike, all at once. "The ability to heal is recorded in history, only we never paid much attention to it."
"Recorded?" I asked, a little jealously.
"Of course," she smiled. "Remember the King's Evil?"
I should have known without her reminding me, after all the old books I had read. "Scrofula, wasn't it? They called it that because the touch of certain kings was supposed to cure it ... and other diseases, too, I guess."