Bramble Bush — Reading Notes

There was nothing singular about the boy's appearance. He was thin, with a pale freckled face and the guileless expression of any normal eight-year-old as he blinked across the desk at Lessing. The awkward grey monitor-helmet concealed a shock of sandy hair. He sat with a mute appeal in his large grey eyes as Lessing flipped the reader-switch and blinked in alarm at the wildly thrashing pattern on the tape.

The boy was terrorized. He was literally pulsating with fear.

Lessing sat back slowly. "Tell me about it, Tommy," he said gently.

"I don't want to go back to the Farm," said the boy.

"I just don't. I hate it there."

"Are you frightened?"

The boy bit his lip and nodded slowly.

"Of me? Of Dr. Dorffman?"

Again the mute appeal in the boy's eyes. He groped for words, and none came. Finally he said, "If I could only take this off--" He fingered the grey plastic helmet.

"You think _that_ would make you feel better?"

"It would, I know it would."

Lessing shook his head. "I don't think so, Tommy. You know what the monitor is for, don't you?"

"It stops things from going out."

"That's right. And it stops things from going in. It's an insulator. You need it badly. It would hurt you a great deal if you took it off, away from the Farm."

The boy fought back tears. "But I don't want to go back there--" The fear-pattern was alive again on the tape. "I don't feel good there. I never want to go back."

"Well, we'll see. You can stay here for a while." Lessing nodded at Dorffman and stepped into an adjoining room with him. "You say this has been going on for _three weeks_?"

"I'm afraid so. We thought it was just a temporary pattern--we see so much of that up there."

"I know, I know." Lessing chewed his lip. "I don't like it. We'd better set up a battery on him and try to spot the trouble. And I'm afraid you'll have to set it up. I've got that young Melrose from Chicago to deal with this morning--the one who's threatening to upset the whole Conference next month with some crazy theories he's been playing with. I'll probably have to take him out to the Farm to shut him up." Lessing ran a hand through sparse grey hair. "See what you can do for the boy downstairs."

"Full psi precautions?" asked Dorffman.

"Certainly! And Jack--in this case, be _sure_ of it. If Tommy's in the trouble I think he's in, we don't dare risk a chance of Adult Contact now. We could end up with a dead boy on our hands."

Two letters were waiting on Lessing's desk that morning. The first was from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book, and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled. Lessing groaned. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck up daytime hours. He knew that his real work was at the Farm--yet he hadn't even been to the Farm in over six weeks. And now, as the book approached publication date, Lessing wondered if he would ever really get back to work again.

The other letter cheered him a bit more. It bore the letterhead of the International Psionics Conference:

In recognition of your position as an authority on human Psionic behavior patterns, we would be gratified to schedule you as principle speaker at the Conference in Chicago on October 12th. A few remarks in discussion of your forthcoming book would be entirely in order--

They were waiting for it, then! He ran the galley proofs into the scanner excitedly. They knew he had something up his sleeve. His earlier papers had only hinted at the direction he was going--but the book would clear away the fog. He scanned the title page proudly. "A Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." A good title--concise, commanding, yet modest. They would read it, all right. And they would find it a light shining brightly in the darkness, a guide to the men who were floundering in the jungle of a strange and baffling new science.