"Defense Mechanism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

“Meat’s going up again,” she said, unwrapping peas and fillets of mackerel. “Mrs. Watkin’s boy, Tom, is back from the clinic. He can see fine now, she says.”

He put water on to boil and began greasing a skillet while she rolled the fillets in cracker crumbs. “If I’d had to run a flame thrower during the war, I’d have worked up a nice case of hysteric blindness myself,” he said. “I call that a legitimate defense mechanism. Sometimes it’s better to be blind.”

“But not all the time,” Martha protested, putting baby food in the double boiler. In five minutes lunch was cooking. “Whaaaa—” wailed Jake.

Martha went into the baby’s room, and brought him out, cuddling him and crooning. “What do you want, Lovekins? Baby just wants to be cuddled, doesn’t baby.”

“Yes,” said Ted.

She looked up, startled, and her expression changed, became withdrawn and troubled, her dark eyes clouded in difficult thought.

Concerned, he asked: “What is it, Honey?”

“Ted, you shouldn’t—” She struggled with words. “I know, it is handy to know what he wants, whenever he cries. It’s handy having you tell me, but I don’t— It isn’t right somehow. It isn’t right.”

Jake waved an arm and squeaked randomly. He looked unhappy. Ted took him and laughed, making an effort to sound confident and persuasive. It would be impossible to raise the kid in a healthy way if Martha began to feel he was a freak. “Why isn’t it right? It’s normal enough. Look at E. S. P. Everybody has that according to Rhine.”

“E. S. P. is different,” she protested feebly, but Jake chortled and Ted knew he had her. He grinned, bouncing Jake up and down in his arms.

“Sure it’s different,” he said cheerfully. “E. S. P. is queer. E. S. P. comes in those weird accidental little flashes that contradict time and space. With clairvoyance you can see through walls, and read pages from a closed book in France. E. S. P., when it comes, is so ghastly precise it seems like tips from old Omniscience himself. It’s enough to drive a logical man insane, trying to explain it. It’s illogical, incredible, and random. But what Jake has is limited telepathy. It is starting out fuzzy and muddled and developing towards accuracy by plenty of trial and error—like sight, or any other normal sense. You don’t mind communicating by English, so why mind communicating by telepathy?”

She smiled wanly. “But he doesn’t weigh much, Ted. He’s not growing as fast as it says he should in the baby book.”

“That’s all right. I didn’t really start growing myself until I was about two. My parents thought I was sickly.”

“And look at you now.” She smiled genuinely. “All right, you win. But when does he start talking English? I’d like to understand him, too. After all, I’m his mother.”

“Maybe this year, maybe next year,” Ted said teasingly. “I didn’t start talking until I was three.”

“You mean that you don’t want him to learn,” she told him indignantly, and then smiled coaxingly at Jake. “You’ll learn English soon for Mommy, won’t you, Lovekins?”

Ted laughed annoyingly. “Try coaxing him next month or the month after. Right now he’s not listening to all these thoughts. He’s just collecting associations and reflexes. His cortex might organize impressions on a logic pattern he picked up from me, but it doesn’t know what it is doing any more than this fist knows that it is in his mouth. That right, bud?” There was no demanding thought behind the question, but instead, very delicately, Ted introspected to the small world of impression and sensation that flickered in what seemed a dreaming corner of his own mind. Right then it was a fragmentary world of green and brown that murmured with the wind.

“He’s out eating grass with the rabbit,” Ted told her.

Not answering, Martha started putting out plates. “I like animal stories for children,” she said determinedly. “Rabbits are nicer than people.”

Putting Jake in his pen, Ted began to help. He kissed the back of her neck in passing. “Some people are nicer than rabbits.”



Wind rustled tall grass and tangled vines where the rabbit snuffled and nibbled among the sun-dried herbs, moving on habit, ignoring the abstract meaningless contact of minds, with no thought but deep comfort.

Then for a while Jake’s stomach became aware that lunch was coming, and the vivid business of crying and being fed drowned the gentler distant neural flow of the rabbit.

Ted ate with enjoyment, toying with an idea fantastic enough to keep him grinning, as Martha anxiously spooned food into Jake’s mouth. She caught him grinning and indignantly began justifying herself. “But he only gained four pounds, Ted. I have to make sure he eats something.”

“Only!” he grinned. “At that rate he’d be thirty feet high by the time he reaches college.”