Forester bristled. "Why not?"

"Do you fix a watch by hitting it with a hammer?" Barenburg interjected.

"No, but—"

"Look, Ted, what do you know about Spoonbender physiology?" the doctor asked. "Anything?"

Forester shrugged. "They were test tube grown from sperm samples taken right after Red Staley won the Smithsonian Triple-P." Soon afterwards, anyway; for a man scornfully labeled a pretentious "spoonbender" to actually win the Provable Psychic Phenomena prize was comparable to Jesse Owens's performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and the press had had a field day with the story. No one else had been able to get near Staley for days. "You enhanced Staley's natural TK by doubling the proper chromosome, giving them all the trisomy problems they've got now—"

"Actually, we were aware of the dangers involved with an extra autosome," Barenburg interrupted, sounding more than a little defensive. "We tried to remove the corresponding autosome from the egg cells before fertilization. But the technique somehow generated instabilities; there were breakages and translocations...." He shook his head as if to clear it. "But that's genetics, not physiology. Do you know anything about their brain chemistry problems?"

"No. I assumed the retardation was due to simple brain damage."

Barenburg shook his head. Something passed over his face, too quickly for Forester to identify. "Our best guess is that there's no real major cellular damage anywhere. The problem is lack of internal communication between the various sections of the brain due to inhibition of the chemicals that act as neurotransmitters at the neural synapses."

Forester frowned. "Then how can they use TK?"

"Apparently that function's fairly localized, and messages within that area get through okay. But for something like intelligence... well, when the abstract thought center is in the parietal lobe, the organizational center for that