FRANK BRYNING
With thoughtful deliberation Dr James Ballantine, psychiatrist, stepped from the elevator house on to the rooftop of the Arthur Buckley Plant Development Institute. He crossed the small trellised enclosure, released the head-high catch on the gate, and opened it gently.
Tiny pink fingers hooked around the gate, low down, and tugged it wide open. A lemon-frocked and bonneted baby girl flung herself at his knees. He picked her up and submitted gladly to a throttling embrace and a long, moist kiss on his cheek.
‘Hello, sweetheart!’ he said when he had her sitting upright on his arm, accompanying the greeting with a smile. ‘Let me look at you. Are you well, Joan?’
She nodded vigorously, her velvet-brown, almost black, eyes dancing.
‘H-ll-w-ncle B-ll-nt-ne,’ she replied in a husky vowel-less whisper, slowly but with clear, painstaking lip movements. Thus well, by sedulous training, had her mother taught her to speak despite her lack of vocal cords.
Ballantine carried her through into the garden, carefully closing the gate. Just before they reached the front door of the penthouse the child wriggled to be put down. She took him by the hand and led him into the hall where her tall, auburn-haired mother, widow of the founder of the Institute, and now its Director, awaited them.
The child hurried into the lounge. When Dr Ballantine and her mother followed her she was seated at her small nursery table, with her bonnet off, and her frosty, albinoid hair gleaming. She seemed almost doll-like as she sat there waiting, her parted lips eager with anticipation.
‘No time yet for adult conversation, Jim,’ said Dr Elizabeth Buckley, smiling. ‘That table was brought in here early this morning, and the cards set out. She knew, without my telling her, that you were coming today.’
‘The matter was in your mind more than once, no doubt,’ Dr Ballantine said, significantly.
Dutifully Ballantine took his seat in the easy-chair across the table from Joan. Before him was a small pack of cards, face downwards. In front of the child was a long box with a hinged lid, like a case in which carvers are kept. With tilted chin and quite calmly the twenty-nine-months-old little girl awaited the ritual of checking.
Under her eyes Ballantine sorted his cards, face upwards, into five groups. There were five cards with a large cross on each, five with a circle, five with a square, five with a star, and five with three parallel wavy lines. Ballantine swept them together, shuffled them thoroughly, and laid them down. Joan stood up, cut them, and placed them before Ballantine, face downwards.
Joan opened her case. In each of five compartments there were five cards of each symbol. She took out one group at a time and counted back the cards into their compartments. Then she raised the lid and fixed a brace to hold it vertically, shielding the cards from Ballantine’s sight.
He took the top card from his pack. Overacting his role of hiding it from her, he peeped at the symbol - a star.
Promptly Joan took a card from her case and laid it face downward on the table, her eyes twinkling with mischief.
Ballantine laid his card face downwards. His next bore a circle. Joan selected another card, and, giggling, covered her first one with it.
* * * *
So they went, card by card, through the twenty-five in each pack. As she put her last card down the little girl clasped her hands and rocked backwards and forwards, laughing silently.
Her mother took the child’s pack and turned it face upwards as Ballantine did the same with his. On top of his pack was a star - on Joan’s three parallel waved lines. At the mock disappointment on the adults’ faces the child grinned with delight.
Next, Ballantine presented a circle. Joan’s pack showed a cross. There was more adult dismay - and more childish glee. And so on, right through both packs. Not one card in Joan’s pack correctly matched its opposite in Ballantine’s. Sadly the adults shook their heads while the child rocked with laughter.
‘We’ll have to try again,’ sighed Ballantine, shuffling his cards while Elizabeth Buckley sorted Joan’s into her box. ‘Something must be wrong.’
Taking her cue, Joan came around the table and searched his coat pocket, producing a small package.
‘Of course!’ Ballantine exclaimed. ‘That must be the trouble.’ He held out his hand. ‘But you can’t have it yet. You must get the cards right, first.’
She dimpled happily. The ritual was being followed wonderfully to her liking. She returned the package to Ballantine, who put it on the piano stool. When he returned she was ready and waiting behind her box.
Ballantine’s first card was a square. Joan slapped her card down. His next was a star. Her second went down at once. In quick time they followed through - this time without the laughter but with mounting excitement.
Joan was out of her chair and standing by the piano stool before they began to check. This time every pair of cards matched. Ballantine clapped his hands.
‘B-nn-h?’ inquired the child, her eager hands almost on the package. ‘B-nn-h f-h J-n?’ At his ostentatious nod she swept up the package and sat on the floor to open it.
‘Really, Jim, I think this game ought to be dropped,’ protested Elizabeth Buckley as she restored the cards to the case. ‘It’s only an entirely feminine game to her now, to get a gift out of you every time you come.’
Ballantine shrugged. ‘It’s as good a game as any, Elizabeth, for as long as she gets fun out of it. I agree we don’t need it now to find out whether she has some kind of extrasensory perception. We know that. Now we’re mainly studying the development of a proved telepath -keeping a case history, and so on. Meanwhile, Rhine’s “ESP cards” still tell us something.’
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. They prove that she is still in command of her already confirmed abilities. She is not becoming confused by her widening apprehension of new things as she grows older - or by her own teasing of us when she deliberately selects the wrong cards. You will notice that she is always either a hundred per cent right or a hundred per cent wrong - and either performance is equally good. In every case she has to know precisely what card I am holding.’
‘P-nk b-nn-h!’ announced Joan, having unwrapped her package. She held up a china rabbit, pink in colour, for her mother to admire. She went to kiss Ballantine, in thanks. Having done so she promptly patted his other pocket. ‘Bl-h b-nn-h!’ she whispered. ‘Bl-h b-nn-h!’
Ballantine threw up his hands. ‘It’s no use, Elizabeth! We can’t expect to keep anything from her - anything she’s able to understand. Here am I with another little game in mind with a blue bunny, twin of the pink one, as a prize. But she already knows about the blue bunny in my pocket. And that proves she can play the new game, before we try it.’
Laughing, Elizabeth Buckley picked up her mutant daughter. ‘That sort of thing is happening to me, more and more, these days,’ she said. ‘Do you still wish to play the new game?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Ballantine assured her. ‘I still want it on record. And Joan must have her prize.’ He took the package from his pocket and put it on the piano stool.
‘Jn’s bl-h b-nn-h!’ pronounced the child.
‘After you play Uncle Ballantine’s new game,’ said her mother, putting her down. ‘Jim, excuse me while I start the tea.’
This time, with Joan in her usual place and her mother opposite in the easychair, Ballantine took a pencil and scribbling pad from his pocket and seated himself in the farthest corner of the room. Elaborately shielding what his pencil was doing, he said, challengingly: ‘Joan doesn’t know what I am drawing!’
Carefully he drew three waved lines.
Joan eyed him from across the room. Then she grinned, picked up a card, and laid it face down on the table. On the next page Ballantine drew a square. Joan put her next card down. Ballantine drew a circle - then a star - a cross. Each time Joan put down a card.
‘Now, Mummy, may we check them, please?’
Without error the cards matched the drawings - and in correct order.
‘Joan knows how to play this game,’ Ballantine acknowledged. ‘Now I shall draw something else. Joan will find it and give it to Mummy.’
Returning to his corner he quickly sketched a tea-cup. Instantly Joan went to the traymobile, lifted the linen drape over the afternoon tea things, took a cup and carried it to her mother.
‘That’s right!’ applauded Ballantine.
Joan waited, her huge dark eyes agleam.
He drew a narrow, trumpet-shaped vase. The child trotted to the big plate-glass window which overlooked the Institute’s experimental farms, six stories below, and took the Indian brass vase from the wide, low sill to her mother.
Next Ballantine drew a small chair of the same design as Joan’s nursery chair. Promptly that chair was picked up and set before her mother.
He began to draw again. There was a clink as Joan took a teaspoon from the traymobile, and another clink as she put it into the cup in front of Elizabeth Buckley.
‘Hey!’ protested Ballantine. ‘I haven’t finished drawing that!’ Then, tongue in cheek, he sketched two big ears and a rabbit face, wishing hard he had a blue pencil.
‘J-n’s bl-h b-nn-h!’ the child whispered, running to the piano stool.
Ballantine laughed.
‘It’s your bunny now, Joan.’
* * * *
Over afternoon tea, Ballantine explained. ‘I had intended, if Joan could draw well enough, to try some experiments in telepathy like those Upton Sinclair and his wife made about fifty years ago - back in 1928, I think it was. But Joan took time by the forelock, so I improvised a bit.’
‘What kind of experiments?’ Joan’s mother asked.
‘I must bring you Mental Radio, Sinclair’s own account of them,’ Dr Ballantine said. ‘Briefly, he would sit in a closed room and draw something - say an umbrella - and concentrate mentally on it. His wife would sit in another closed room, concentrating on him, and would draw or write down “whatever came into her mind”. They got some remarkable successes, many partial successes, and still more failures.’
‘For example?’ asked Dr Buckley.
‘Well, when he drew a sailing boat she wrote down “sailboat”. He drew three linked circles and she drew three linked circles. He drew a cone and she drew a cone. There were quite a number of others, equally accurate. But there were more “partial successes”, as when he drew an hourglass and she wrote “white sand”. He drew a bat flying, and she wrote “beetle, working its legs”. He drew a skull and cross-bones, and she wrote “bug, with legs”. And there were many complete failures. I thought Joan would be able to do that sort of thing and score a high percentage.’
‘I don’t think she could draw well enough,’ Elizabeth Buckley said.
‘I suppose not,’ Ballantine conceded. ‘We might try some other time. But when she named the blue bunny in my pocket I knew what to do. She scored a hundred percent, as usual.’
‘And what does it prove?’ Joan’s mother asked.
‘Little more than we knew already. But you will see that Rhine’s “ESP cards” give Joan a restricted and predetermined set of only five symbols to think about, and they limit me, as “sender”, to those same five symbols. By guessing, alone, any non-telepath can score some successes, as J.B. Rhine himself proved and allowed for in his work at Duke University. But Sinclair’s method, where it succeeds, is a much more positive demonstration of telepathy. He, as “sender”, might select anything in the universe - one thing out of millions. The person who “receives” that thing, or several such things, clearly and definitely, as Mrs Sinclair did, is doing something much more significant than achieving a high score with “ESP cards”.’
‘I see that,’ Elizabeth Buckley poured him a second cup of tea. ‘What of the partial successes and the failures?’
‘I think they show the difference between Joan and the rest of us. There is reason to suspect that we all have some slight and fleeting capacity for telepathy. Mrs Sinclair and others may have had better-than-average capacity, however fragmentary, fugitive, and uncontrollable. But Joan has it like a fully developed sixth sense. It works all the time, with her.’
Elizabeth Buckley frowned. ‘But don’t you think she must have quite a few failures and only partial successes, too - even if they are only caused by her difficulty with adult thoughts beyond her mental capacity?’
‘I agree,’ Ballantine said, nodding. ‘But she never seems to miss on anything within her understanding.’
Joan had taken her two china bunnies to her nursery. Now she returned, hugging a coal-black kitten, which she brought right up to Ballantine and dropped in his lap. ‘K-tt-h!’ she said. ‘J-n’s k-tt-h!’
‘You will see the finding of the kitten in a Report Sheet,’ explained Elizabeth Buckley a few minutes later, as she handed Ballantine some written notes. ‘A good item for the records, I think - one of our first animal contacts.’
Ballantine nodded. He was watching Joan and the kitten playing ‘follow the leader’, the kitten in front - around the piano, behind the door, under the table ... And for the hundredth time he was speculating whether there could be any relationship between the albinoid skin and hair, the almost black irises, the lack of vocal cords, and the telepathic ability of the child. Between these seemingly random mutations he could see only one thing in common - their origin in the same overexposure to radioactivity which had caused the death of her father before she was born.
‘When did you get the kitten?’ he asked.
‘One day last week, when I went to look at the new tomato mutants,’ Elizabeth Buckley replied. ‘I took Joan with me for the outing. It was a good opportunity, with only two mental contacts - Mr Johnston who runs the tomato farm, and his wife.’
‘Did they give it to her?’
‘No,’ Elizabeth Buckley said. ‘Joan found it. We were walking past some huge stacks of boxes which had just been delivered into the yard. Suddenly Joan stopped. She turned into a narrow alley between stacks. Then she turned again, and we lost sight of her. I was annoyed, and a bit scared, because those stacks aren’t perfectly stable. I followed her, and Mr Johnston came too.
‘Joan went quite a distance, turning left, right, and left again. We found her squatting on the ground, talking to the kitten, which was imprisoned inside a case at the bottom of a stack. It was mewing faintly, and putting out a tentative paw. Somehow it must have been brought in with the boxes the day before.
‘I took Joan away while Mr Johnston worked the box out to rescue the kitten. There were tears and struggles, for Joan objected to leaving. But Mr Johnston wouldn’t risk disturbing the stack while we were there. From the moment he brought out it out the kitten and Joan have been almost inseparable. Joan demanded a drink for the kitten at once. Mrs Johnston gave it some milk, and it certainly was thirsty.’
‘Could she have heard the mewing, do you think?’ Ballantine asked.
‘Impossible, I’m sure,’ Joan’s mother answered. ‘The kitten was too far away when she started after it. There were two big stacks of boxes between them. And Mr Johnston and I were talking.’
‘So it seems she picks up animal mental impulses, too.’
Elizabeth Buckley gently stirred her tea. ‘Apparently. I notice she always knows just where to find the kitten about the house and garden. She never searches for it. She goes straight to wherever it is. And as often as it follows her she follows it - under tables, under her cot, on all fours along the windowsill there, around behind the sofa - anywhere!’
‘If she’s getting the kitten’s mental images she’s probably trying to share its pleasures,’ said Ballantine. Then he grinned. ‘Has she tried to lap up milk with it yet?’
‘Jim! How awful!’
‘Is it - really?’ He chuckled. ‘Hygienically it is, of course. But as companionship it is admirable. More than one child has done that, and without being a telepath. Doesn’t Joan share her food with the kitten - or try to?’
‘Why, yes,’ said Elizabeth Buckley, surprise in her voice. ‘I didn’t think of that as the same thing. But it is, of course, if you leave hygiene out of it. Do you think there is any harm in her sharing the kitten’s impulses?’
‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Ballantine said, thoughtfully. ‘I must consider it. Presumably an animal’s impulses are simple, direct, and uncomplicated. Better than many human ones, no doubt. I should think Joan would quickly learn by experience that what the kitten anticipates with joy is not always such fun to her. Also she should find the kitten quite unable to enjoy some of her pleasures.’
‘I have noticed, too,’ said Elizabeth Buckley, ‘that when she and the kitten are absorbed in their own affairs, Joan is less likely to take notice of what I am thinking. Several times I have had to use my voice quite loudly to get her attention.’
‘That,’ said Ballantine, ‘might be quite important. It suggests a possible means of insulating herself from that ever-threatening mental babel we have always feared for her. Deep absorption in some interest may enable her to do for herself some part of what you do for her now. I mean that special rapport she has with you when in your arms.’
‘Let us hope so,’ said Elizabeth Buckley, rising to move the traymobile. ‘I won’t always be - Oh no! No!’
With eyes dilated and blanched cheeks Joan’s mother was staring, horror-stricken, out through the open French windows.
Ballantine sprang to his feet. He saw Joan, on her hands and knees, on the breast-high parapet which encircled the rooftop. A yard or so ahead was the kitten. They had climbed up a trellis which screened the roof garden from the laundry drying yard, and made a corner with the parapet. Joan, now two yards along the wall, got to her feet.
Together the two adults rushed to the French windows. Simultaneously each put out a hand to restrain the other.
‘Careful - no panic,’ cautioned Ballantine. ‘You go and just take her off into your arms. I’d better not try. She and I fool too much!’
‘She’ll know what I’m thinking,’ worried Elizabeth Buckley, as the child began to walk after the cat, ‘and lose her confidence.’
‘She hasn’t noticed us yet,’ countered Ballantine. ‘She must be absorbed in the game. Don’t call her. Just think - or whisper something irrelevant to yourself. “Mary had a little lamb” - anything.’
With a nod, Elizabeth Buckley was already on her way, unhurried and outwardly calm, her lips moving soundlessly.
The kitten saw her coming. Now five or six yards along the parapet, it hesitated, looked back at Joan, and then jumped down amongst the pots and troughs of the garden. Scampering back to the trellis, it scrambled up again, and then disappeared along the parapet on the other side.
Halfway to Joan, Elizabeth Buckley despairingly watched the child turn on the low-cambered sixteen-inch cap of the wall and follow the kitten.
Joan darling - wait for me! The thought came unbidden, her agonised eyes fixed on the child.
‘Mary had a little lamb ...’
But the silken, white hair blew in the breeze and the chubby pink legs marched on ... Undisturbed, Joan reached the trellis, put a hand on it to steady herself, and passed beyond it.
At that moment Elizabeth Buckley tripped and fell headlong into the garden.
Joan! Joan! Come back, darling!
She neither cried out nor uttered a sound. But she could not hold back her desperate, anguished mental cry of despair. Joan! Come back!
Ballantine threw caution to the winds and ran along the house wall to the trellis gate, trying to think of some fabulous bribe to induce Joan to pause - until he realised that she would see through any such trick. He never improved on that idea, for when he burst through the gate the child was not to be seen.
Horror-stricken, he saw that the parapet was clear except for the kitten, now seated and watching him with wide, innocent eyes. The clean, wind-swept drying yard was empty.
Sick at heart he rushed to the parapet, to hoist his head and shoulders over it. He forced himself to look down, dreading what he might see.
‘Oh my darling, my darling!’ came Elizabeth Buckley’s voice through the trellis. ‘Oh God!’
Back through the gate tore Ballantine, not knowing quite why. Haggard and tense, he plowed his way amongst tubs and pots to her side.
In a gust the breath came out of him, with relief at the sight of Elizabeth Buckley, still half-lying amongst the plants, scratched, torn, and dishevelled, but with her small daughter in her arms.
The child’s husky whisper came to him as, with her head on her mother’s shoulder, she stroked her mother’s cheek.
‘P-r M-mm-h. N-t fr-ght-n n-nh m-re. J- c-me b-ck. N-t fr-gh-t n-nh m-re. J-re s-re f-t.’
Through brimming eyes Elizabeth Buckley looked over the baby’s head at Ballantine as he raised her to a sitting position. She smiled wanly, the tears glistening on her cheeks. ‘Joan came back to help me, Uncle Ballantine, because I fell over. In my heart I cried out to her.’
‘And you’re not frightened any more,’ he confirmed.
‘J-st s-re f-t,’ added Joan.
‘She’s right,’ said her mother, as Ballantine dried her cheeks with his breast pocket handkerchief. ‘I have hurt my ankle. But I didn’t notice is, until now.’
While Ballantine helped Elizabeth Buckley inside, Joan clung to her. The baby’s head pressed against her bosom, with a cradling warmth that aroused all of her protective instincts and filled her with a strange rejoicing. But for the first time in her experience the mother felt she was unable to fulfil her proper role. Several times she tried to put the child down until her emotional turmoil could subside, but little Joan clung all the more tightly.
* * * *
‘I’m afraid, Jim,’ Elizabeth Buckley said, propped up on a couch while Ballantine applied a cold compress to her ankle. ‘I just can’t achieve the required cool, calm, and collected frame of mind just now. Joan’s clinging to me in the usual manner, but I think our roles are reversed. I still feel terrified. She is calming me, if anything. I’m sure I’m not helping her.’
Not for ten minutes more did Joan consent to be put down. Ballantine closed the French windows to keep her from the garden.
‘If this sort of thing can happen,’ said Elizabeth Buckley, when the child had gone to her room, ‘we’ll have to leave the penthouse.’
‘I should hope not,’ protested Ballantine. ‘If you lived on the ground there would be many more hazards for Joan. She’d be exposed to dangerously haphazard mental contacts and many more animal contacts, with gates left open, traffic, and so on. I think this is still the ideal place to provide her with the necessary isolation - if we can keep her from marching along the cap of that wall again. If you have the trellis brought back from the parapet about five feet she’d never be able to climb up there a second time while she’s too young to understand the danger.’
‘Should I get rid of the kitten?’ Elizabeth Buckley asked, her voice tremulously.
‘I don’t know. Admittedly it led her into this danger - or that’s what we suspect. But when we eliminate the means of climbing up there again, or anywhere else, she will be unable to follow the kitten into such danger.’
‘But she’s so susceptible. There may be other dangers. She’ll be led into them all.’
‘There are fewer hazards on this rooftop than anywhere else I can imagine,’ Ballantine assured her. ‘And don’t forget, Elizabeth, that the very faculty that makes her so susceptible is the same faculty by which she is learning to share your awareness of what seems safe or unsafe to you. She is much more likely than any other child to learn early to approve or disapprove of what her mother approves or disapproves. She may take telling no better than any other child. But she can gain an emotional awareness of why and wherefore through sharing your awareness.’
‘I don’t quite see -’
‘Well, you might still have to restrain her from, say, sharing the cat’s milk. Suppose you do. You can, I think, be sure she will learn to reject such delights all the sooner because she will feel and share your revulsion at the same time as you admonish her.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
‘So do I,’ Ballantine affirmed. ‘Don’t forget that the faculty that betrayed her into following the kitten also enabled her to walk in danger with a confidence similar to the kitten’s. And it brought her back into safety in answer to your mental cry of anguish. Remember - “in your heart” you cried out to her, and not with your voice. If only you -’
He broke off as Joan, in tears, came running from the nursery.
‘M-mm-h l-k!’ she pleaded in her tensest whisper, and pointed out through the French windows, where the kitten was again walking along the parapet. ‘K-tt-h! G-t K-tt-h! K-tt-h f-ll d-wn - g-t sm-sh!’
Ballantine glanced around at the kitten, and swung round. ‘Hear that?’ he demanded, his eyes shining. ‘She had already learned -’
‘From my fear,’ agreed Elizabeth Buckley, the strained look of the past quarter-hour leaving her face at once. Then in another tone of voice, appropriately urgent, yet cheerful, she asked:
‘Uncle Ballantine, will you please take Kitty off the wall? Joan and I are frightened she’ll fall right down to the ground - and get smashed!’
First published 1955.