Quicksand Page 16

  -- Mongoloids tend to be sickly and die young. This girl's very much alive, and I don't have to test her IQ to tell that she isn't an idiot.

  "Good afternoon, Paul," she said with elaborately precise diction. The exaggerated vowel-deformations that had marked her first attempts to pronounce English had given way to an almost accentless mirror of those around her.

  "Good afternoon," he returned.

  "What we do today?" A thrusting forward of her tongue between her lips, as though stoppering the escape route of. the words, and a correction. "Sorry. What will we do today?"

  -- Apparently it's not enough for her to get her meaning across. She insists on doing it idiomatically.

  "Very good," he approved. But it was bound to be a waste of time giving a verbal description of what he planned. She would catch on through simple example. Nonetheless he spoke as he set out and demonstrated the first test: a form-board designed for bright primary children and retarded adolescents.

  "When I say 'start' you put these in the holes."

  She went through the easy ones so quickly it wasn't worth worrying about the timing. He moved ahead to the more complex versions, based on the combination of tangram-like pieces of multicoloured card to match assorted geometrical figures -- squares, stars and crosses. Silent at the side of the room, Nurse Davis noted the times on a printed form which had been included in the package.

  He had been expecting Urchin to show the first signs of difficulty when it came to the colour-reversal sequence, involving the reconstruction of previously accomplished figures with the contrasting colours exchanged. But she caught on to the idea so quickly that Nurse Davis almost missed clicking the stopwatch.

  -- Lord! I don't have to check the instructions to know that she's over the limits of measurement on all those!

  He turned to withdraw the next test from the box: a Passalong test, sophisticated cousin of a well-known children's puzzle, in which the order of sliding squares had to be reversed within a time limit. When he glanced back he found that Urchin had taken several of the scraps of card belonging to the previous tests and grouped them, tangram-fasbion, into an amusing sketch of a man and a woman standing together.

  Seeing he was ready to proceed, she swept them aside with a chuckle and leaned forward to examine the Passalong. When he thought he had made it clear what was wanted, he told her to start.

  She stared at it without making a move, long enough for him to grow worried lest he had failed to convey the purpose of it. Just as he was about to call it off and try a fresh run, she shot out her hand and completed the task with swift, economical motions. As far as he could tell, she had figured out the optimum series of moves and then carried them out with no false starts.

  -- She's going to rate over 150. Could be a lot higher.

  Next he tried a sequence-touching test: tapping coloured cards in the same order as the examiner had done. At first there were only four, but more were added. When he had exhausted the seven supplied with the kit, Paul included on impulse two more belonging to another test. Urchin went through the entire nine with matter-of-fact briskness and not a single error.

  -- I'm not even within shouting distance of her abilities!

  Sighing, he turned to the last tests he had on hand. If none of these presented her any difficulty, he'd have to send for a battery of advanced adult tests and sort out the ones least dependent on the use of words.

  The concluding group consisted of pattern recognitions: simple matching to begin with, then tests for awareness of topological identity, including inversions, mirror-images and deformations, then some really tough ones -- both odd-man-out and group-completion involving points of resemblance so subtle Paul felt himself baffled by them, and finally a series dependent on analogies rather than actual identity.

  Here at long last there were a couple which she didn't get right, but they were in the hardest section of all, and she did the correct thing by skipping them when they failed to strike her at once, so that she completed the remainder within the time limit.

  -- She's enjoying this. Look how her eyes are sparkling.

  Well . . . That left one simple test, too subjective for his own taste but vouched for by experts as adequately correlated with g. He gave her a large sheet of white paper and a pencil, established that she knew what the word "draw", meant, and told her to draw a man.

  Rising, he went over to the window and beckoned Nurse Davis to show him her timings. He ran down them, comparing each with the highest score in the tables supplied, and eventually shook his head.

  "Something wrong, Doctor?" the nurse ventured.

  "I wish there was!" Paul blurted. "Then I'd feel happier about her being in Chent!"

  "She's done very well, hasn't she?"

  Paul gave a sour grin. "She's over the limit on almost all these tests, which means she'd place about a hundred and eighty on the scale. And this is meaningless. I remember one of my professors saying that IQ tests were defensible up to about a hundred and twenty, debatable up to a hundred and fifty, and laughable anywhere above that because the subject is probably brighter than the man who invented the test. Time must be just about up, hm?"

  Nurse Davis turned back towards Urchin and looked over her shoulder. After a second she began to giggle.

  "You ought to be flattered, Doctor! It's good enough to be framed!"

  Paul stared at what Urchin had done. Nurse Davis was right. He was looking at one of the most masterly pencil portraits he had ever seen, and the subject was himself.

  *25*

  A hawthorn hedge visible from the window of the staff sitting-room had put on white blossom as thick as a snowstorm. Gazing at it, Paul reviewed the progress he had made in dealing with his twin problems: Urchin, and Iris. Having obtained concrete proof of Urchin's intelligence, he had been left on the horns of a dilemma. Her behaviour continued apparently rational, with no further outbreaks like the attack on the nurse at Blickham General -- nothing, in fact, but a slight disagreement with a newly arrived nurse who tried to force her to eat a stew with meat in it against Paul's instructions that she should be allowed a vegetarian diet. This suggested that Nurse Davis's description of her as "foreign" was the correct one.

  On the other hand, she was becoming so fluent in English that Paul was inclined to wonder whether she was really learning it for the first time. There were two alternatives: she might be relearning something temporarily lost through hysterical amnesia, or she might all along have been pretending not to understand. The last possibility was the least likely. Shoemaker had been dogmatic about the difficulty of constructing an imaginary language which would baffle a trained philologist. However, she rated as a genius in every test he had been able to apply; perhaps someone of such outstanding intellect could devise and stick to an invented language.

  A showdown with Iris could not be put off much longer. Faced with its inevitability, Paul had begun to feel less and less certain of persuading her to accept the pregnancy. He needed some sort of reassurance of his own abilities, and sought it in an early resolution of the mystery of Urchin. She was now in command of a vocabulary which ought to have let her answer inquiries about her origins, even if only in the most general terms. He had worked up gradually to some direct questions, growing more and more irritated with her evasions, and today he was virtually certain she had lied to him when she claimed not to know the right words to phrase her answers.

  On the verge of accusing her, he had suddenly recovered his professional control and realised that if she was lying to him this must be due to a disturbance of the personality. He would be very ashamed of himself if he lost his temper with a patient for something that the patient couldn't help. Which of the staff at Chent should know better than Paul Fidler, ex-madman, what that helplessness was like?

  Having dismissed her, he found himself in the grip of another of his visions of disaster narrowly avoided: this time, a fantasy in which Urchin lost her trust in him because he had shouted at her, refused further co-oper
ation and ultimately retreated into such apathy that there was no hope of her ever leaving Chent. It upset him so much that he abandoned his work and came to collect his tea and biscuits ahead of time.

  There was no urgency about Urchin's case. He sensed that. A point might be reached at which she felt sufficiently confident of her ability to express her meaning and began to talk freely, but no one -- probably not even she herself -- could forecast when it would arrive. By contrast, the embryo in Iris's womb was growing inexorably in accordance with biological laws, and he could name to the week, if not to the day, the very latest moment when he would have to face the issue.

  Knowing that, he still could not concentrate on preparing for it. His mind remained dominated by Urchin, as he saw her during his daily rounds of the hospital. Sister Wells had given her a portfolio with a broken handle from the cupboard where the unclaimed effects of deceased patients were stored; she had mended it neatly with a braided cord, and now carried it everywhere. It contained the objects she had accumulated to help her find her bearings: notepad and pencil, a child's picture dictionary, a cheap atlas in limp covers, a drawing-book which he had bought for her when, on impulse, he adopted Nurse Davis's suggestion and took the portrait she had made of him into Blickham to have it framed. It now hung on the wall of his office; when she'd seen it there for the first time, Urchin had hugged him in delight at the compliment.

  A couple of times he had asked to inspect the contents of the bag, but even the atlas, which fascinated her so much she had annotated almost every page in her curious spiky private writing, did not afford a lever with which to pry open her defences. A request to point out her home still produced the same response as at first: she indicated the vicinity of Chent.

  -- Could she have been raised in total isolation, Kaspar Hauser fashion, by some lunatic genius who taught her a language he, not she, had invented . . . ? No, it's absurd; she'd be so agoraphobic. But it makes as much sense as the other possibilities!

  Radio was relayed throughout the hospital during the patients' daytime rest-periods, and there was a TV set in each of the sitting-rooms -- fitted with locked switches so the staff could control the choice of programmes. Paul regarded this as overprotective, but it wasn't a matter on which he wanted to start an argument. He had observed Urchin's reaction to both. Music puzzled her, whether the broadcast was of a symphony concert or the top twenty pops, but she listened to the spoken word with avidity. Television was especially useful, it seemed; when the commentary matched words written on the screen -- sales slogans in commercials, sports results given both verbally and visually, and so forth -- that supplied her with a sound-to-spelling key. Yet she always appeared dismayed at what the screen reported, as thought the entire world contributed to some universal, horrifying fantasy.

  The last evening when he was on duty, Paul had been making a quiet tour of the wards when he came on a group of female patients watching a current affairs programme. The ragbag of subjects included a controversial new play, a row over the government's defence policy, and the escape of a notorious criminal from jail.

  A little apart from the others, Urchin stood -- she was too short to sit and watch except in the front row of chairs, and long-term patients claimed those as of right. Unnoticed in shadow, Paul studied her, hopeful for a clue to her condition.

  The excerpt from the play, and the interview with the author which followed, were meaningless to her, but when she recognised familiar words she repeated them to herself. That seemed sensible.

  The subject switched to defence policy, and there were newsreels from Viet-Nam: troops burning a village of thatched huts, helicopters hunting a fleeing man across a rice-paddy until a well-aimed shot brought him down, refugees leading their children along a muddy road. These affected her deeply; she bit down on her lower lip.

  But there was little to enlighten him here, Paul decided. Most averagely sensitive people might be equally upset. He was on the point of slipping away when the final item came on.

  At first Urchin appeared not to understand it, but when the meaning seeped through -- a sketch showed the route the escaped prisoner had taken, and pictures of spiked walls and guarded gates told their own story -- she was so overcome she had to turn away. Turning, she saw Paul staring at her, and for a moment her eyes locked with his.

  They were full of tears.

  "Hullo, Paul!" Mirza exclaimed, jingling the hand-bell; although weeks had gone by, no electrician had appeared to resite the push of the electric one. "You're not exactly a bundle of joy today, are you? How's Iris?"

  "Oh -- she's fine, thanks."

  "Glad to hear it." Mirza paused while Lil brought him his tea, then continued: "Well, whatever it is that's getting you down, it can't be the woman who's the next closest to your heart. Urchin's making remarkable progress, isn't she?"

  "Yes and no. . . ." Paul shrugged. "Certainly she's coming along better than I have any right to expect."

  "So what's the big depression for? Holy Joe been at you again?"

  "Not that either." Paul gave a wan smile. "The truth is, I suppose, I'm fundamentally unused to things going right for me. Holinshed's got off my back, Alsop is delighted with what I'm doing, my work is under control for a change -- so I ought to be overjoyed. But the more things go right, the worse it's likely to be if they go wrong, isn't it?"

  "It's about the most pessimistic philosophy I've ever heard of," Mirza murmured, stirring his tea with a gentle tinkling of his spoon.

  Paid hesitated. For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to take Mirza into his confidence and ask his advice about Iris. He had no one else to turn to, and he could be sure of the Pakistani's sympathy. But in another moment this room would be full of people, and he dared not risk them picking up even the tail-end of his oppressive secret.

  He compromised. "Time for a drink before dinner, Mirza? We've got out of the habit since Iris came home."

  "I'd like to," Mirza nodded. "But not before dinner, I'm afraid. I shall be working late. Afterwards?"

  Paul tossed a mental coin. Evenings at home alone with Iris were becoming a torment, because every time he glanced at her he found himself seeking signs of her condition. He was convinced that her period was overdue, but she hadn't mentioned the fact, and he still hadn't found a way to raise it himself. On the other hand, no matter how much he wanted to talk to Mirza, there would be a row if he announced be was going out on his own.

  "Why don't you bring Iris down to the Needle about nine?" Mirza said, while he was still debating.

  "Well . . ."

  "You could run into me by chance. And I don't think a little frigid politeness would be bad for her. How about it?"

  -- Better than sitting at home like last night, I guess.

  "Yes, okay. About nine."

  Iris welcomed the suggestion of going out for a drink, probably -- Paul suspected -- because it distracted her from her own anxieties. Even before Mirza "ran into them by chance," however, she had lapsed into apathy, answering Paid in monosyllables.

  Once the Pakistani had joined them, Paul studied her narrowly, expecting a recurrence of the behaviour she had exhibited when he had invited Mirza home. Tonight, though, she seemed to lack the energy for it, and he realised with some surprise that it couldn't have been the automatic, conditioned process he had assumed. It required conscious control and a lot of effort.

  -- In which case . . . A defence mechanism. Habits equal stability/security; the existence of people who behave differently, regardless of colour which is only an extra outward sign, is a threat to the personality. The way we do things is the "right" way. The purpose of freezing out the alien is to avoid being exposed on future occasions to more reminders that "right" is an arbitrary term. In its most advanced form this is culture shock: where the victim is so outnumbered by people following different customs and unspoken assumptions that privacy equates to effective insanity. But that means . . .

  Paid exclaimed and snapped his fingers. Mirza broke off in the mid
dle of a story he was telling, to which Iris was not even pretending to listen, and blinked in surprise.