It was hard work. Davison felt his hands beginning to redden from the contact with the rough sandpaper surfaces of the plants’ leaves, and his back started to ache from the constant repetition of the unaccustomed pattern of motion. Down, up, reach around. Down, up, reach around.
He ground his teeth together and forced himself to keep going. His arm was throbbing from the exertion of using muscles that had lain unbothered for years. Sweat rolled down his forehead, crept into his collar, fell beadily into his eyebrows. His clothes seemed to be soaked through and through.
He reached the end of the furrow at last, and looked up. Rinehart was waiting there for him, arms akimbo, looking almost as cool and fresh as he had when he had begun. He was grinning.
“Tough sled, eh, Ry?”
Too winded to say anything, Davison simply nodded.
“Don’t let it get you. A couple of weeks out here, and it’ll toughen you up. I know how you city fellows are at the start.”
Davison mopped his forehead. “You wouldn’t think just pulling pods off a plant could be so rough,” he said.
“It’s tough work, and I’m not denying it,” Rinehart said. He pounded Davison affectionately on the back. “You’ll get used to it. Come on back to the house, and I’ll get you some beer.”
Davison started in as a full-time picker the next day. It was, like all the other days promised to be, hot.
The whole family was out with him—the two elder Rineharts, Janey, Bo, and Buster. Each had his own harness strapped on, with the basket behind for dropping in the pods.
“We’ll start down at the east end,” Rinehart said, and without further discussion the entire crew followed him down. Each took a furrow. Davison found himself with Janey on his left, Bo Rinehart on his right. Further down the field, he could see Dirk Rinehart already fearsomely making his way through the close-packed rows of plants, a two-legged picking machine and nothing more. He watched the older man’s effortless motions for a moment, and then, conscious that Janey and Bo were already a few steps ahead of him, he set to work.
He was wearing an open shirt and a pair of ragged trousers that he’d had since his college days. It was his most comfortable outfit. Bo was wearing a pair of jeans, no shirt; the upper part of his body, sunbronzed and heavy-muscled, gleamed brightly. Buster, the younger brother, whose body still retained some youthful chubbiness, was clad in the swim trunks that seemed to be the customary boys’ garb. Janey wore briefs and a sort of wraparound halter; Davison eyed her lean brown legs approvingly. It was an efficient farming machine, this family. He plunged into his work with a will, happy to be part of their unit.
The morning sun was still climbing in the sky, and the day had not yet reached its peak of heat, but Davison began to perspire after only a few moments of bending and yanking. He stopped to rub his sleeve over his forehead and heard light, derisive laughter come from up ahead.
Flushing hotly, he glanced up and saw Janey pausing in her furrow, hands on her hips, grinning back at him. It was much the same pose her father had taken the day before, and it irritated him. Without saying anything, he bent his head and returned to the job of picking.
A muscle at the base of his right arm began to complain. It was the business of reaching back and thrusting the picked pod into the basket that was doing it, straining the arm-socket muscles in a way they had never been used before.
Kechnie’s mocking words drifted back to him. “You don’t want your muscles to atrophy, son” They had been words spoken lightly, in jest—but, Davison now realized, they carried with themselves a certain measure of truth.
He had relied on his psi for the ordinary tasks of life, had gloried in his mastery of the power to relieve himself of a portion of everyday drudgery. Little things—things like opening doors, pulling up hassocks, moving furniture. It was simpler to teek an object than to drag it, Davison had always felt. Why not use a power, if you have it to perfection?
The answer was that he didn’t have it to perfection—yet. Perfection implied something more than utter control of objects; it meant, also, learning moderation, knowing when to use the psi and when not to.
On Earth, where it didn’t matter, he had used his power almost promiscuously. Here he didn’t dare to—and his aching muscles were paying the price of his earlier indulgence. Kechnie had known what he was doing, all right.
They reached the end of the furrow finally. Davison and Buster Rinehart came in in a dead heat for last place, and Buster didn’t even seem winded. Davison thought he caught a shred of disapproval on Rinehart’s face, as if he were disappointed at his hired hand’s performance, but he wasn’t sure. There was a definite expression of scorn on Janey’s face; her eyes, under their heavy lids, sparkled at him almost insultingly.
He glanced away, over to Rinehart, who was emptying his basket into the truck that stood in the middle of the field. “Let’s dump here before we start the next row,” he said.
The field seemed to stretch out endlessly. Davison lifted his basket with nerveless fingers and watched the gray-green pods tumble into the back of the truck. He replaced it in his harness, feeling oddly light now that the dragging weight no longer pulled down on him.
He had a fleeting thought as they moved on to the next batch of furrows: How simple it would be to teek the pods into the baskets! No more bending, no swivelling, no arms that felt like they were ready to fall off.
Simple. Sure, simple—but if Janey or Bo or any of the others should happen to turn around and see the beanpods floating mysteriously into Davison’s basket, he’d be roasting by nightfall.
Damn Kechnie, he thought savagely, and wiped a glistening bead of sweat from his face.
What had seemed like a wry joke half an hour before now hung temptingly before Davison’s eyes as as very real possibility.
He was almost an entire furrow behind the rest of them. He was disgracing himself. And his poor, unused, unathletic body was aching mercilessly.
He had the power, and he wasn’t using it. He was penning it up within himself, and it hurt. It was the scalding soup all over again; he didn’t know if it hurt more to keep bending and dragging his numb arm back up again in the blistering heat, or to pen the psi up within him until it seemed almost to be brimming out over the edges of his mind.
Davison forced himself to concentrate on what he was doing, forced himself to forget the power. This is the learning process, he told himself grimly. This is growing up. Kechnie knows what he’s doing.
They reached the end of the furrow, and through a dim haze of fatigue he heard Rinehart say, “Okay, let’s knock off for a while. It’s getting too hot to work, anyway.”
He shucked off his harness and dropped it where he was, and began to walk back toward the farmhouse. With an unvoiced sigh of relief, Davison wriggled out of the leather straps and stood up straight.
He made his way across the field, noticing Janey fall in at his side. “You look pretty bushed, Ry,” she said.
“I am. Takes a while to get used to this sort of work, I guess.”
“Guess so,” the girl said. She reached out and kicked a clump of dirt. “You’ll toughen up,” she said. “Either that or you’ll fall apart. Last hired man we had fell apart. But you look like better stuff.”
“Hope you’re right,” he said, wondering who the last hired man was and what power it was that he had cooped up within himself. For some, it wouldn’t be so bad. A precog wouldn’t need a training session like this—but precogs were one in a quadrillion. Telepaths might not, either, since anyone who had tp already had such a high-voltage mind that this sort of kindergarten toilet-training was unnecessary.