Lost Legacy
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Lost Legacy (1941) is a novella by Robert A. Heinlein. It tells of the rediscovery of psychic powers by a trio of students, and the attempts of a corrupt elite to silence them. It is collected in the book Assignment in Eternity.
The novella is an exploration of the possibilities that people, with the proper training, have the potential to make use of a wide range of telepathic and telekinetic abilities. It is based on the presumption that most, if not all, humans have innate psychic abilities, but simply don't know it and therefore do not make use of them. This ignorance is encouraged by a mysterious and powerful cabal which benefits from keeping people unaware of their abilities. Many of Heinlein's signature literary qualities, including the witty repartee between characters, the more-than-capable and strongly independent female heroine, the shadowy, barely identified evil adversaries, and the themes of civil liberties, self-improvement, and the lack of necessity of an overarching set of "civilized" strictures on behaviors and actions by "superior" humans, are all represented here and will resurface in his later works.
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