"Three. A fourth in the centre their heads together. I thought it was one of their games and I walked away."
"They make no secret of it," someone observed.
"Yes," I said, "they took it for granted that we knew what they were doing."
"No one spoke," Mark said. "I can vouch for that."
"Yet they were listening," I said. "They giggled and laughed as if some great joke was taking place or the way children laugh about a game that delights them."
It was Dr Goldbaum who put his finger on it. He said, very gravely, "Do you know, Jean you always said that we might open that great area of the mind that is closed and blocked in us. I think that they have opened it. I think they are teaching and learning to listen to thoughts."
There was a silence after that, and then At.w.a.ter, one of our psychologists, said uneasily, "I don"t think I believe it. I"ve investigated every test and report on telepathy ever published in this country the Duke stuff and all the rest of it. We know how tiny and feeble brain waves are it is fantastic to imagine that they can be a means of communication."
"There is also a statistical factor," Rhoda Lannon, a mathematician, observed. "If this faculty existed even as a potential in mankind, is it conceivable that there would be no recorded instance of it?"
"Maybe it has been recorded," said Fleming, one of our historians. "Can you take all the whippings, burnings and hangings of history and determine which were telepaths?"
"I think I agree with Dr Goldbaum," Mark said. "The children are becoming telepaths. I am not moved by a historical argument, or by a statistical argument, because our obsession here is environment. There is no record in history of a similar group of unusual children being raised in such an environment. Also, this may be and probably is a faculty which must be released in childhood or remain permanently blocked. I believe Dr Haenigson will bear me out when I say that mental blocks imposed during childhood are not uncommon."
"More than that," Dr Haenigson, our chief psychiatrist, nodded. "No child in our society escapes the need to erect some mental block in his mind. Whole areas of every human being"s mind are blocked in early childhood. This is an absolute of human society."
Dr Goldbaum was looking at us strangely. I was going to say something but I stopped. I waited and Dr Goldbaum said: "I wonder whether we have begun to realise what we may have done. What is a human being? He is the sum of his memories, which are locked in his brain, and every moment of experience simply builds up the structures of those memories. We don"t know as yet what is the extent or power of the gift these children of ours appear to be developing, but suppose they reach a point where they can share the totality of memory? It is not simply that among themselves there can be no lies, no deceit, no rationalisation, no secrets, no guilts it is more than that."
Then he looked from face to face, around the whole circle of our staff. We were beginning to comprehend him. I remember my own reactions at that moment, a sense of wonder and discovery and joy and heartbreak too; a feeling so poignant that it brought tears to my eyes.
"You know, I see," Dr Goldbaum nodded. "Perhaps it would be best for me to speak about it. I am much older than any of you and I have been through, lived through the worst years of horror and b.e.s.t.i.a.lity that mankind ever knew. When I saw what I saw, I asked myself a thousand times: What is the meaning of mankind if it has any meaning at all, if it is not simply a haphazard accident, an unusual complexity of molecular structure? I know you have all asked yourselves the same thing. Who are we? What are we destined for? What is our purpose? Where is sanity or reason in these bits of struggling, clawing, sick flesh? We kill, we torture, we hurt and destroy as no other species does. We enn.o.ble murder and falsehood and hypocrisy and superst.i.tion; we destroy our own body with drugs and poisonous food; we deceive ourselves as well as others and we hate and hate and hate.
"Now something has happened. If these children can go into each other"s minds completely then they will have a single memory, which is the memory of all of them. All experience will be common to all of them, all knowledge, all dreams and they will be immortal. For as one dies, another child is linked to the whole, and another and another. Death will lose all meaning, all of its dark horror. Mankind will begin, here in this place, to fulfil a part of its intended destiny to become a single, wonderful unit, a whole almost in the old words of your poet, John Donne, who sensed what we have all sensed at one time, that no man is an island unto himself. Has any thoughtful man lived without having a sense of that singleness of mankind? I don"t think so. We have been living in darkness, in the night, struggling each of us with his own poor brain and then dying with all the memories of a lifetime. It is no wonder that we have achieved so little. The wonder is that we have achieved so much. Yet all that we know, all that we have done, will be nothing compared to what these children will know and do and create "
So the old man spelled it out, Harry and saw almost all of it from the beginning. That was the beginning. Within the next twelve months, each one of our children was linked to all of the others telepathically. And in the years that followed, every child born in our reservation was shown the way into that linkage by the children. Only we, the adults, were forever barred from joining it. We were of the old, they of the new; their way was closed to us forever although they could go into our minds, and did. But never could we feel them there or see them there, as they did each other.
I don"t know how to tell you of the years that followed, Harry. In our little, guarded reservation, man became what he was always destined to be, but I can explain it only imperfectly. I can hardly comprehend, much less explain, what it means to inhabit forty bodies simultaneously, or what it means to each of the children to have the other personalities within them, a part of them what it means to live as man and woman always and together. Could the children explain it to us? Hardly, for this is a transformation that must take place, from all we can learn, before p.u.b.erty and as it happens, the children accept it as normal and natural indeed as the most natural thing in the world. We were the unnatural ones and one thing they never truly comprehended is how we could bear to live in our aloneness, how we could bear to live with the knowledge of death as extinction.
We are happy that this knowledge of us did not come at once. In the beginning, the children could merge their thoughts only when their heads were almost touching. Bit by bit, their command of distance grew but not until they were in their fifteenth year did they have the power to reach out and probe with their thoughts anywhere on Earth. We thank G.o.d for this. By then the children were ready for what they found. Earlier, it might have destroyed them.
I must mention that two of our children met accidental death in the ninth and the eleventh year. But it made no difference to the others, a little regret, but not grief, no sense of great loss, no tears or weeping. Death is totally different to them than to us; a loss of flesh; the personality itself is immortal and lives consciously in the others. When we spoke of a marked grave or a tombstone, they smiled and said that we could make it if it would give us any comfort. Yet later, when Dr Goldbaum died, their grief was deep and terrible, for his was the old kind of death.
Outwardly, they remained individuals each with his or her own set of characteristics, mannerisms, personality. The boys and the girls make love in a normal s.e.xual manner though all of them share the experience. Can you comprehend that? I cannot but for them everything is different. Only the unspoiled devotion of mother for helpless child can approximate the love that binds them together yet here it is also different, deeper even than that.
Before the transformation took place, there was sufficient of the children"s petulance and anger and annoyance but after it took place, we never again heard a voice raised in anger or annoyance. As they themselves put it, when there was trouble among them, they washed it out when there was a sickness, they healed it; and after the ninth year, there was no more sickness even three or four of them, when they merged their minds, could go into a body and cure it.
I use these words and phrases because I have no others, but they don"t describe. Even after all these years of living with the children, day and night, I can only vaguely comprehend the manner of their existence. What they are outwardly, I know, free and healthy and happy as no men were before, but what their inner life is remains beyond me.
I spoke to one of them about it once, Arlene, a tall, lovely child whom we found in an orphanage in Idaho. She was fourteen then. We were discussing personality, and I told her that I could not understand how she could live and work as an individual, when she was also a part of so many others, and they were a part of her.
"But I remain myself, Jean, I could not stop being myself."
"But aren"t the others also yourself?"
"Yes. But I am also them."
"But who controls your body?"
"I do, of course."
"But if they should want to control it instead of you?"
"Why?"
"If you did something they disapproved of," I said lamely.
"How could I?" she asked. "Can you do something you disapprove of?"
"I am afraid I can. And do."
"I don"t understand. Then why do you do it?"
So these discussions always ended. We, the adults, had only words for communication. By their tenth year, the children had developed methods of communication as far beyond words as words are beyond the dumb motions of animals. If one of them watched something, there was no necessity for it to be described; the others could see it through his eyes. Even in sleep, they dreamed together.
I could go on for hours attempting to describe something utterly beyond my understanding, but that would not help, would it, Harry? You will have your own problems, and I must try to make you understand what happened, what had to happen. You see, by the tenth year, the children had learned all we knew, all we had among us as material for teaching. In effect, we were teaching a single mind, a mind composed of the unblocked, unfettered talent of forty superb children; a mind so rational and pure and agile that to them we could only be objects of loving pity.
We have among us Axel Cromwell, whose name you will recognise. He is one of the greatest physicists on Earth, and it was he who was mainly responsible for the first atom bomb. After that, he came to us as one would go into a monastery an act of personal expiation. He and his wife taught the children physics, but by the eighth year, the children were teaching Cromwell. A year later, Cromwell could follow neither their mathematics nor their reasoning; and their symbolism, of course, was out of the structure of their own thoughts.
Let me give you an example. In the far outfield of our baseball diamond, there was a boulder of perhaps ten tons. (I must remark that the athletic skill, the physical reactions of the children, was in its own way almost as extraordinary as their mental powers. They have broken every track and field record in existence often cutting world records by one third. I have watched them run down our horses. Their movements can be so quick as to make us appear sluggards by comparison. And they love baseball among other games.) We had spoken of either blasting the boulder apart or rolling it out of the way with one of our heavy bulldozers, but it was something we had never gotten to. Then, one day, we discovered that the boulder was gone in its place a pile of thick red dust that the wind was fast levelling. We asked the children what had happened, and they told us that they had reduced the boulder to dust as if it was no more than kicking a small stone out of one"s path. How? Well, they had loosened the molecular structure and it had become dust. They explained, but we could not understand. They tried to explain to Cromwell how their thoughts could do this, but he could no more comprehend it than the rest of us.
I mention one thing. They built an atomic fusion power plant, out of which we derive an unlimited store of power. They built what they call free fields into all our trucks and cars, so that they rise and travel through the air with the same facility they have on the ground. With the power of thought, they can go into atoms, rearrange electrons, build one element out of another and all this is elementary to them, as if they were doing tricks to amuse and amaze us.
So you see something of what the children are, and now I shall tell you what you must know.
In the fifteenth year of the children, our entire staff met with them. There were fifty-two of them now, for all the children born to us were taken into their body of singleness and flourish in their company, I should add, despite their initially lower IQs. A very formal and serious meeting, for in thirty days the team of observers were scheduled to enter the reservation. Michael, who was born in Italy, spoke for them; they needed only one voice.
He began by telling us how much they loved and cherished us, the adults who were once their teachers. "All that we have, all that we are, you have given us," he said. "You are our fathers and mothers and teachers and we love you beyond our power to say. For years now, we have wondered at your patience and self-giving, for we have gone into your minds and we know what pain and doubt and fear and confusion you all live with. We have also gone into the minds of the soldiers who guard the reservation. More and more, our power to probe grew until now there is no mind anywhere on Earth that we cannot seek out and read.
"From our seventh year, we knew all the details of this experiment, why we were here and what you were attempting and from then until now, we have pondered over what our future must be. We have also tried to help you, whom we love so much, and perhaps we have been a little help in easing your discontents, in keeping you as healthy as possible, and in easing your troubled nights in that maze of fear and nightmare that you call sleep.
"We did what we could, but all our efforts to join you with us have failed. Unless that area of the mind is opened before p.u.b.erty, the tissues change, the brain cells lose all potential of development, and it is closed forever. Of all things, this saddens us most for you have given us the most precious heritage of mankind, and in return we have given you nothing."
"That isn"t so," I said. "You have given us more than we gave you."
"Perhaps," Michael nodded. "You are very good and kind people. But now the fifteen years are over, and the team will be here in thirty days "
I shook my head. "No. They must be stopped."
"And all of you?" Michael asked, looking from one to another of the adults.
Some of us were weeping. Cromwell said: "We are your teachers and your fathers and mothers, but you must tell us what to do. You know that."
Michael nodded, and then he told us what they had decided. The reservation must be maintained. I was to go to Washington with Mark and Dr Goldbaum and somehow get an extension of time. Then new infants would be brought into the reservation by teams of the children, and educated here.
"But why must they be brought here?" Mark asked. "You can reach them wherever they are go into their minds, make them a part of you?"
"But they can"t reach us," Michael said. "Not for a long time. They would be alone and their minds would be shattered. What would the people of your world outside do to such children? What happened to people in the past who were possessed of devils, who heard voices? Some became saints, but more were burned at the stake."
"Can"t you protect them?" someone asked.
"Some day yes. Now, no there are not enough of us. First, we must help move children here, hundreds and hundreds more. Then there must be other places like this one. It will take a long time. The world is a large place and there are a great many children. And we must work carefully. You see, people are so filled with fear and this would be the worst fear of all. They would go mad with fear and all that they would think of is to kill us."
"And our children could not fight back," Dr Goldbaum said quietly. "They cannot hurt any human being, much less kill one. Cattle, our old dogs and cats, they are one thing "
(Here Dr Goldbaum referred to the fact that we no longer slaughtered our cattle in the old way. We had pet dogs and cats, and when they became very old and sick, the children caused them peacefully to go to sleep from which they never awakened. Then the children asked us if we might do the same with the cattle we butchered for food.) " but not people," Dr Goldbaum went on. "They cannot hurt people or kill people. We are able to do things that we know are wrong, but that is one power we have that the children lack. They cannot kill and they cannot hurt. Am I right, Michael?"
"Yes you are right." Michael nodded. "We must do it slowly and patiently and the world must not know what we are doing until we have taken certain measures. We think we need three years more. Can you get us three years, Jean?"
"I will get it," I said.
"And we need all of you to help us. Of course we will not keep any of you here if you wish to go. But we need you as we have always needed you. We love you and value you, and we beg you to remain with us ..."
Do you wonder that we all remained, Harry that no one of us could leave our children or will ever leave them, except when death takes us away? There is not so much more that I must tell now.
We got the three years we needed, and as for the grey barrier that surrounds us, the children tell me that it is a simple device indeed. As nearly as I can understand, they altered the time sequence of the entire reservation. Not much by less than one thousandth of a second. But the result is that your world outside exists this tiny fraction of a second in the future. The same sun shines on us, the same winds blow, and from inside the barrier, we see your world unaltered. But you cannot see us. When you look at us, the present of our existence has not yet come into being and instead there is nothing, no s.p.a.ce, no heat, no light, only the impenetrable wall of non-existence.
From inside, we can go outside from the past into the future. I have done this during the moments when we experimented with the barrier. You feel a shudder, a moment of cold but no more.
There is also a way in which we return, but understandably, I cannot spell it out.
So there is the situation, Harry. We will never see each other again, but I a.s.sure you that Mark and I are happier than we have ever been. Man will change, and he will become what he was intended to be, and he will reach out with love and knowledge to all the universes of the firmament. Isn"t this what man has always dreamt of, no war or hatred or hunger or sickness or death? We are fortunate to be alive while this is happening, Harry we should ask no more.
With all my love, Jean
Felton finished reading, and then there was a long, long silence while the two men looked at each other. Finally, the Secretary spoke: "You know we shall have to keep knocking at that barrier trying to find a way to break through?"
"I know."
"It will be easier, now that your sister has explained it."
"I don"t think it will be easier," Felton said tiredly. "I do not think that she has explained it."
"Not to you and me, perhaps. But we"ll put the eggheads to work on it. They"ll figure it out. They always do."
"Perhaps not this time."
"Oh, yes," the Secretary nodded. "You see, we"ve got to stop it. We can"t have this kind of thing immortal, G.o.dless, and a threat to every human being on Earth. The kids were right. We would have to kill them, you know. It"s a disease. The only way to stop a disease is to kill the bugs that cause it. The only way. I wish there was another way, but there isn"t."