Thirst No. 4 by Christopher Pike

an academic sense. But already you’ve admitted it was Cynthia who came up with the idea to use the large group of kids to predict changes in the stock market.”
    Sharp nods reluctantly. “Cindy was the smartest of the lot, the most driven. She was the first to grasp the implications of my work. She helped me a lot when it came to tinkering with the arrays, improving how the kids did. In the beginning, we were very close.”
    “Did you have a falling out later?” I ask.
    He shrugs and lowers his head. “It wasn’t that way. I got a stroke, I got sick. I was in bed for over a year. The university forced me to retire, although I think they used my illness as an excuse. They never appreciated my work.”
    “Was Cindy married to Thomas Brutran at the time?” I ask.
    “To Tom? No, they got together later. When I met Cindy, she was with Fredrick Wild. You must have seen his name listed online. He was on the original IIC board.” Sharp smiles wistfully as he recalls the good old days. “We used to call him Freddy or Fried Freddy. He was a huge devotee of LSD, mushrooms, and other mind-expanding drugs. He used to worry me, I was scared he would damage his brain. He was the exact opposite of Cindy. They were an odd couple, to be sure. But she loved him. I never saw a girl so much in love. And boy she was jealous! If Freddy so much as looked at another girl she went on the warpath.”
    “Did Freddy feel the same about Cindy?” I ask.
    Sharp hesitates. “He loved her, sure, intensely. They were very close. Unfortunately, they weren’t compatible. Freddy was a laid-back hippie and Cindy was driven to get ahead. They wanted to be together but it didn’t work out. And so Cindy ended up with Tom, Thomas.”
    “Does Cindy love Tom?” I ask, although I already know the answer.
    “He loves her but I doubt she ever got over Freddy.”
    “Then why did she marry Tom?”
    Sharp shook his head. “Tom was rich and handsome. They had more in common than Cindy and Freddy. Tom was clean-cut, well disciplined. He wore a sports coat to campus while most kids his age had on shorts and sandals. I knew that one day he’d be president of a company. And you see, that’s what’s happened.”
    “IIC is not a normal company.”
    “You’ll get no argument from me on that point.”
    “Were Noel Brent and Wendy Brent married when they were your students?” I ask.
    “They got married shortly after I came up with the array. They had to. Wendy got pregnant and Noel pretty much did what she told him to.”
    “It sounds like the women were the real power when it came to your graduate students.”
    “That’s true about Cindy and Wendy. But you couldn’t say that about Freddy. No one told that guy what to do. He was a free thinker. I’ve told you that Cindy helped me refine the early arrays, but Freddy was a big help as well. He was the one who figured out how to get them to talk.”
    My heart skips. “Talk?”
    Sharp suddenly looks as if he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I didn’t mean that literally.”
    “How did you mean it?” I ask.
    Sharp is distinctly uncomfortable. “Freddy came up with a list of experiments that allowed us to extract information from the kids.”
    “What kind of information?”
    “Your usual New Age drivel. I didn’t think it was important at the time.”
    “But later?” I ask.
    Sharp brushes the question away. “Don’t get hung up on that part of our research. There was nothing there we could prove.”
    “Professor, I’m afraid you contradict yourself. On one hand you say Freddy was a big help. He had insights into the early arrays and got them to talk. Then you act like the information he came up with wasn’t important.”
    “I don’t think it was important.”
    “At least tell us how he got the arrays to talk.”
    Sharp shrugs. “None of his techniques were scientific. It was more along the lines of spiritualism. The type of people drawn to those cults are always trying