Callahan's Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson

young. I barely comprehended the things that Paul was telling me, and if I understood what had happened, I surely didn’t understand why it had hit him as hard as it obviously had. Being able to read minds had no drawback that my nineyear-old mind could see; I sure didn’t know much about human nature. But I was trying hard to emphatize with my big brother.
    “That’s the only explanation I have for what occurred. Because as Paul reached the terrible climax of his story, for one split second a shutter opened-and like a camera plate, my child’s mind was imprinted with the total contents of the mind of my brother.
    “It lasted only that split second, and it faded about as fast as a flashbulb-burst from two feet away; the impact was over quickly, but the blinding afterimage seared my brain for many seconds more. I screamed. Several times. Instantly our positions were reversed, and Paulie was holding me, restraining my hands. He knew at once what had happened, and the grim set of his jaw said that he had been expecting it for years now.
    ” ”It’s over,’ he barked, `Jimmy listen tome, it’s over. It won’t happen again for months, maybe years.’ “
    “It wasn’t what he said but the pure joyous relief of how far away his voice sounded that cut through my child’s terror and brought me back from the edge of hysteria. Why, Paulie was miles away-at least a foot! And there were comforting walls of bone, cartilage and skin-and blessed empty air!-between us. I calmed down, and Paulie held me tightly in his arms and in savage whispers explained to me what I was, what had happened to us, and what I could expect from now on. He had hoped, he said, that I would be spared because my maternal genes were different from his; he explained genetics to me, as well as it can be explained to a nineyear-old, and he told me what a mutant was. He told me how much easier to bear the telepathic flashes would become, and he told me how much easier they would not become. He told me how often to expect the onslaught (`flashing,’ he called it), and advised me on how to avoid flashing by avoiding sentient beings as much as possible. I suppose you could say it was the end of my childhood. I knew that four years later, when my father haltingly undertook to explain the Facts of Life to me, they came as a helluvan anticlimax.
    “I suppose that next landmark in the story is the night my father and I found Paul collapsed across my mother in the living room, the lamp that had crushed her skull still clenched in his hand, but I don’t think I want to talk about that now. They took Paul away that night, like a sack of sugar, and hauled him off to King’s Park, completely catatonic. He’s been that way ever since, and as far as I can tell he never flashed again. Or anything.
    “That was fourteen years ago.”
     
    Callahan had been refilling his glass as he talked, but MacDonald spilled this one over half the table. He drank the rest as fast as it could pour and shut up.
    “I get it,” Fast Eddie said after a while. “Yer afraid de same t’ing is gonna happen to you.”
    “Jesus,” Doc Webster said in an undertone behind me, “lie’s just about due.” I did some rapid mental calculation, and turned pale.
    “No, Eddie,” I said aloud. “Jim’s overdue. Unless .” I let it trail off.
    MacDonald grinned hideously, shook his head. “No, friend, I haven’t killed anyone yet … though I wouldn’t care to make any predictions for tomorrow. No, my pattern didn’t follow Paul’s after all. Not precisely, that is. For one thing, I never was an instant echo.
    “I waited all through adolescence for the next flash, and when it hadn’t come by the time I graduated high school I dared to begin to hope that I was different. By sophomore year of college, I’d shoved the fear back into the far corners of my mind, and convinced myself that my one fleeting experience had been a freak, perhaps Paul sending instead of receiving for