A request from a friend:
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A short story I read as a child has been on my mind. It comes and goes, so I may have already asked you about it. But tell me if it rings a bell:
In the story I'm thinking of, there's a female protagonist. She discovers a super-power in herself when she's young—She has the power of telekinesis. She can lift paperclips and other objects of small mass. She gleefully imagines the great power she will wield as her abilities mature, and what an important person she will be on the world stage. But, to her bitter disappointment, she has never developed the ability to do more than lift a paperclip. She's an adult now, working in some mundane job. She's a nobody. That's her situation at the start of the story. Over the course of the story, whose events I do not remember at all, except that they had something to do with world politics, she gets over her youthful grandiosity, and her bitter disappointment, and comes to the realization that her power comes from how she applies her ability, not how big a thing she can move with her mind. Within the limits of her ability, if she does the hard work of learning the necessary content, she can—and this is the climactic scene—use her mind to go into the heart of some important world figure and, with the precision of a surgeon, move something the size of a paperclip, and make his heart stop beating.
I keep thinking of it as a pretty true story about what it's really like to be gifted.
I read it in a magazine—Maybe Galaxy, maybe Analog, less likely Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had an older cousin who subscribed. I was probably between 10 and 13 years old, but I don't really know.
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That would be circa 1970. Any ideas, oh hive mind? |
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