At a gesture from Nina, the others left the mother and child alone in the nursery.
When they were well down the corridor, Nina burst out triumphantly,
"The first contact! Child has communicated to mother. Message received and answered. Child has used primary sense of communication, rather than learning to rely on secondary!" Nina squared her shoulders proudly. "My baby won't have to cry to tell me that it's hungry or cold or wet and miserable!"
Lucifer's New England conscience prodded him. If indeed there was anything to this psi heredity business, then he had again hurt someone else, unknowingly, but deeply. What would Nina say and feel when she learned that he had no psi talent to pass on to their child?
But this uneasy remorse conflicted with another emotion in Lucifer: The sense of excitement that he suddenly realized had been lost somewhere back in the early years of his psi testing. Somewhere, sometime along the way the sense of wonder had gone out of his work and his life. The constant repetition of the same basic testing technique had made a familiar backyard out of—what had Huth called it?—the very frontier of science.
Huth was speaking to him.
"What do you think now, Dr. Brill? Could it be possible after all that the unorthodoxy of Earth's parapsychology might have to be shaken from its own orthodoxy?"
Lucifer frowned. "I do not want to split definitions with you. But it should be obvious to any scientific mind that Miss Poteil's experiment, although interesting, was painfully inadequate in methodology. In the first place, can we determine whether the child was communicating a need, or whether a psi-positive mother had some precognition of her child's need? In the second place, would a large number of children born of psi-positive parents react with significant difference from a similar number of children born of psi negatives?"
"A flash of lightning can be duplicated in the laboratory," said Huth, "but it is still a flash of lightning. We recognize lightning, we admit its existence, but we do not wish to go on proving forever in the laboratory that lightning is in fact lightning. If some of your earlier scientists had been content to do that, your cities would still be illuminated by oil lamps."
"A fallacious comparison!"