Defense Mechanism

KATHERINE MacLEAN

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THE ARTICLE was coming along smoothly, words flowing from the typewriter in pleasant simple sequence, swinging to their predetermined conclusion like a good tune. Ted typed contentedly, adding pages to the stack at his elbow.

A thought, a subtle modification of the logic of the article began to glow in his mind, but he brushed it aside impatiently. This was to be a short article, and there was no room for subtlety. His articles sold, not for depth, but for an oddly individual quirk that he could give to commonplaces.

While he typed a little faster, faintly in the echoes of his thought the theme began to elaborate itself richly with correlations, modifying qualifications, and humorous parenthetical remarks. An eddy of especially interesting conclusions tried to insert itself into the main stream of his thoughts. Furiously he typed along the dissolving thread of his argument.

“Shut up,” he snarled. “Can’t I have any privacy around here?”

The answer was not a remark, it was merely a concept; two electro-chemical calculators pictured with the larger in use as a control mech, taking a dangerously high inflow, and controlling it with high resistance and blocs, while the smaller one lay empty and unblocked, its unresistant circuits ramifying any impulses received along the easy channels of pure calculation. Ted recognized the diagram from his amateur concepts of radio and psychology.

“All right. So I’m doing it myself. So you can’t help it!” He grinned grudgingly. “Answering back at your age!”

Under the impact of a directed thought the small circuits of the idea came in strongly, scorching their reception and rapport diagram into his mind in flashing repetitions, bright as small lightning strokes. Then it spread and the small other brain flashed into brightness, reporting and repeating from every center. Ted even received a brief kinesthetic sensation of lying down, before it was all cut off in a hard bark of thought that came back in exact echo of his own irritation.

“Tune down!” It ordered furiously. “You’re blasting in too loud and jamming everything up! What do you want, an idiot child?”

Ted blanketed down desperately, cutting off all thoughts, relaxing every muscle; but the angry thoughts continued coming in strongly a moment before fading.

“Even when I take a nap,” they said, “he starts thinking at me! Can’t I get any peace and privacy around here?”

Ted grinned. The kid’s last remark sounded like something a little better than an attitude echo. It would be hard to tell when the kid’s mind grew past a mere selective echoing of outside thoughts and became true personality, but that last remark was a convincing counterfeit of a sincere kick in the shin. Conditioned reactions can be efficient.

All the luminescent streaks of thought faded and merged with the calm meaningless ebb and flow of waves in the small sleeping mind. Ted moved quietly into the next room and looked down into the blue-and-white crib. The kid lay sleeping, his thumb in his mouth and his chubby face innocent of thought. Junior—Jake.

It was an odd stroke of luck that Jake was born with this particular talent. Because of it they would have to spend the winter in Connecticut, away from the mental blare of crowded places. Because of it Ted was doing free lance in the kitchen, instead of minor editing behind a New York desk. The winter countryside was wide and windswept, as it had been in Ted’s own childhood, and the warm contacts with the stolid personalities of animals through Jake’s mind were already a pleasure. Old acquaintances—Ted stopped himself skeptically. He was no telepath. He decided that it reminded him of Ernest Thompson Seton’s animal biographies, and went back to typing, dismissing the question.

It was pleasant to eavesdrop on things through Jake, as long as the subject was not close enough to the article to interfere with it.

Five small boys let out of kindergarten came trooping by on the road, chattering and throwing pebbles. Their thoughts came in jumbled together in distracting cross currents, but Ted stopped typing for a moment, smiling, waiting for Jake to show his latest trick. Babies are hypersensitive to conditioning. The burnt hand learns to yank back from fire, the unresisting mind learns automatically to evade too many clashing echoes of other minds.

Abruptly the discordant jumble of small boy thoughts and sensations delicately untangled into five compartmented strands of thoughts, then one strand of little boy thoughts shoved the others out, monopolizing and flowing easily through the blank baby mind, as a dream flows by without awareness, leaving no imprint of memory, fading as the children passed over the hill. Ted resumed typing, smiling. Jake had done the trick a shade faster than he had yesterday. He was learning reflexes easily enough to demonstrate normal intelligences. At least he was to be more than a gifted moron.

A half hour later, Jake had grown tired of sleeping and was standing up in his crib, shouting and shaking the bars. Martha hurried in with a double armload of groceries.

“Does he want something?”

“Nope. Just exercising his lungs.” Ted stubbed out his cigarette and tapped the finished stack of manuscript contentedly. “Got something here for you to proofread.”

“Dinner first,” she said cheerfully, unpacking food from the bags. “Better move the typewriter and give us some elbow room.”

Sunlight came in the windows and shone on the yellow table top, and glinted on her dark hair as she opened packages.

“What’s the local gossip?” he asked, clearing off the table. “Anything new?”

“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.”

“So would any baby.” But she smiled at the idea, and gave Jake his next spoonful still smiling. Ted did not tell his real thought, that if Jake’s abilities kept growing in a straight-line growth curve, by the time he was old enough to vote he would be God; but he laughed again, and was rewarded by an answering smile from both of them.

The idea was impossible, of course. Ted knew enough biology to know that there could be no sudden smooth jumps in evolution. Smooth changes had to be worked out gradually through generations of trial and selection. Sudden changes were not smooth, they crippled and destroyed. Mutants were usually monstrosities.

Jake was no sickly freak, so it was certain that he would not turn out very different from his parents. He could be only a little better. But the contrary idea had tickled Ted and he laughed again. “Boom food,” he told Martha. “Remember those straight-line growth curves in the story?”

Martha remembered, smiling, “Redfern’s dream—sweet little man, dreaming about a growth curve that went straight up.” She chuckled, and fed Jake more spoonfuls of strained spinach, saying, “Open wide. Eat your boom food, darling. Don’t you want to grow up like King Kong?”

Ted watched vaguely, toying now with a feeling that these months of his life had happened before, somewhere. He had felt it before, but now it came back with a sense of expectancy, as if something were going to happen.

It was while drying the dishes that Ted began to feel sick. Somewhere in the far distance at the back of his mind a tiny phantom of terror cried and danced and gibbered. He glimpsed it close in a flash that entered and was cut off abruptly in a vanishing fragment of delirium. It had something to do with a tangle of brambles in a field, and it was urgent.

Jake grimaced, his face wrinkled as if ready either to smile or cry. Carefully Ted hung up the dish towel and went out the back door, picking up a billet of wood as he passed the woodpile. He could hear Jake whimpering, beginning to wail.

“Where to?” Martha asked, coming out the back door.

“Dunno,” Ted answered. “Gotta go rescue Jake’s rabbit. It’s in trouble.”

Feeling numb, he went across the fields through an outgrowth of small trees, climbed a fence into a field of deep grass and thorny tangles of raspberry vines, and started across.

A few hundred feet into the field there was a hunter sitting on an outcrop of rock, smoking, with a successful bag of two rabbits dangling near him. He turned an inquiring face to Ted.

“Sorry,” the hunter said. He was a quiet-looking man with a yet. “It can’t understand being upside down with its legs tied.” Moving with shaky urgency he took his penknife and cut the small animal’s pulsing throat, then threw the wet knife out of his hand into the grass. The rabbit kicked once more, staring still at the tangled vines of refuge. Then its nearsighted baby eyes lost their glazed bright stare and became meaningless.

“Sorry,” the hunter said. He was a quiet-looking man with a sagging, middle-aged face.

“That’s all right,” Ted replied, “but be a little more careful next time, will you? You’re out of season anyhow.” He looked up from the grass to smile stiffly at the hunter. It was difficult. There was a crowded feeling in his head, like a coming headache, or a stuffy cold. It was difficult to breathe, difficult to think.

It occurred to Ted then to wonder why Jake had never put him in touch with the mind of an adult. After a frozen stoppage of thought he laboriously started the wheels again and realized that something had put him in touch with the mind of the hunter, and that was what was wrong. His stomach began to rise. In another minute he would retch.

Ted stepped forward and swung the billet of wood in a clumsy sidewise sweep. The hunter’s rifle went off and missed as the middle-aged man tumbled face first into the grass.

Wind rustled the long grass and stirred the leafless branches of trees. Ted could hear and think again, standing still and breathing in deep, shuddering breaths of air to clean his lungs. Briefly he planned what to do. He would call the sheriff and say that a hunter hunting out of season had shot at him and he had been forced to knock the man out. The sheriff would take the man away, out of thought range.

Before he started back to telephone he looked again at the peaceful, simple scene of field and trees and sky. It was safe to let himself think now. He took a deep breath and let himself think. The memory of horror came into clarity.

The hunter had been psychotic.

Thinking back, Ted recognized parts of it, like faces glimpsed in writhing smoke. The evil symbols of psychiatry, the bloody poetry of the Golden Bough, that had been the law of mankind in the five hundred thousand lost years before history. Torture and sacrifice, lust and death, a mechanism in perfect balance, a short circuit of conditioning through a glowing channel of symbols, an irreversible and perfect integration of traumas. It is easy to go mad, but it is not easy to go sane.

“Shut up!” Ted had been screaming inside his mind as he struck. “Shut up.”

It had stopped. It had shut up. The symbols were fading without having found root in his mind. The sheriff would take the man away out of thought reach, and there would be no danger. It had stopped.

The burned hand avoids the fire. Something else had stopped. Ted’s mind was queerly silent, queerly calm and empty, as he walked home across the winter fields, wondering how it had happened at all, kicking himself with humor for a suggestible fool, not yet missing—Jake.

And Jake lay awake in his pen, waving his rattle in random motions, and crowing “glaglagla gla—” in a motor sensory cycle, closed and locked against outside thoughts.

He would be a normal baby, as Ted had been, and as Ted’s father before him.

And as all mankind was “normal.”