11

FIVE HOURS difference.

In London, Keven thought, people were in the middle of their night while hers hadn’t yet begun. She was a little disturbed by the idea of anyone, particularly anyone in London, being ahead of her. It seemed they had the advantage of already knowing the immediate future.

Fifteen minutes until exercise time. At exactly seven o’clock she’d be in touch with Hazard. In touch, she thought regretfully, wasn’t true. Hearing from? Seeing? Feeling? All those. Maybe a better way of putting it was sensing. Yes, she’d be sensing him. But not in touch, not touching.

All that day and the day before she’d been looking forward to this exercise, her anticipation building as the time drew nearer. No matter that the connection would be tenuous, brief and one-way. It was, she felt, a privileged form of communion, actually more intimate than a letter or phone call. The intimacy of it was enhanced by the fact that this time she wouldn’t be all wired up. Kersh had suggested they forego the computer analysis and monitoring, at least for the first few of these overseas exercises. He had her sit outside on the flagstone steps with a watch, an ordinary sketch pad, and a spectrum of crayons. She welcomed not being responsible to all that complex electronic equipment and, in her opinion, the late-day sun reflecting on the Sound was much more helpful than a black nothing wall. She was on her own—a condition she’d always told herself was best.

He’d been gone four days.

The previous Friday he’d left her in bed at his place, just given her a kiss and picked up his bag and gone to the airport. Good-bye was something they’d never said to one another, so it would have seemed an ill omen to say it then. Earlier he’d asked her if she wanted to see him off at the airport and she’d told him no, keeping her reason to herself. Soon after he left she got up, dressed hurriedly, and took a cab out to Kennedy.

She knew which flight he was taking and from a discreet vantage she watched him check in at the counter. Him, outstandingly familiar to her among strangers. It was a sad amusement for her to observe his stance, the various physical ways he alone expressed himself, gestures and facial expression. She recognized signs of his impatience and believed she also saw his anxiety.

He stopped at a concession to buy candy bars and she mentally chastized him for eating such junk. He also bought a couple of magazines she knew he’d be able to read from cover to cover in practically no time. He’d be bored, she thought, but not if she were going with him. If she were going with him she might even let him eat the candy without saying a word.

He headed for his boarding gate. Going up the long red-carpeted tunnel there weren’t many people, and if he’d turned to look back then he would have seen her. If that happened she was prepared to run to him and present herself as a surprise. But he didn’t turn and she kept her eyes on the back of him, picturing how he looked from the front.

She didn’t follow him into the boarding lounge. She waited in the tunnel until she was sure he’d gone aboard and then she went to the vacant lounge to stand by the window and see the silver, red and white mass of the jet already disconnected and moving slowly away sideways. There were the plane’s many windows framing the lighted faces of passengers looking out. She tried to find his face but couldn’t definitely and finally had to settle on one she believed was his. She waved for attention with both arms, and she kept on waving until after the jet rolled forward and out of view. For a long while she stood there. It wasn’t like her to cry and as usual she didn’t have any tissues in her bag. She blamed the damned airplane.

Back in the city she went to her own place. She hadn’t been there for days and mail had accumulated. Nothing important, just junk mail trying to get her to send money. Among them a solitary handwritten one. A letter from the mother. She knew what it would say and she skimmed the lines for the sum of it. Can you spare a little? Love and kisses and God watch over her. At least this time, thought Keven, the mother wasn’t asking for the money to be sent Western Union, not that desperate this time.

Better do it now and get it out of the way. She wrote a check for a hundred, tore it up and wrote another for a hundred fifty. The check alone in an envelope seemed too severe. She enclosed a short note saying all was fine and hope this helps. She stamped it with an air mail and then, as an afterthought, put on enough additional stamps and printed “Special Delivery” above the mother’s current address. If she mailed it that night it would arrive in Salt Lake City the next day. But she undressed completely, let her clothes just drop anywhere and went into the kitchen hoping to find something to eat that suited her mood.

Not much there. Celery and carrot sticks she’d cut a week before had kept fresh in a jar of water; so, some of those and a slightly stale slice of organic whole-grain bread. She poured too much Tupelo honey on the bread and ate it standing there, getting honey on her fingers and the corners of her mouth. As she licked off the stickiness she suddenly became very aware of her tongue, reminded of its various uses. She recognized the thought as a wedging one that might open up serious self-appraisal if she allowed it. She replaced it with the happier prospect of ice cream. In the freezer compartment she found some forgotten rocky road, her second most favorite. Half a quart weeks old with lots of frost crystals on it. She took it and a spoon into the other room.

An everything room. She called it that rather than the renting term “single.” One space with a section near the entrance that was supposed to be a dining area. Every time she moved she vowed the next place would have a bedroom but she always eventually settled for another similar everything room. Always only partially furnished because she too quickly lost interest in it.

She lay nude and uncovered, with a leg up on the back of the convertible sofa, an immodest alone position, and her thoughts went to him flying away at thirty-five thousand feet. He was way up and she was down. The ice cream had a refrigerator taste but it was better than nothing. He was just away on an ordinary trip he would surely return from, she pretended, thinking positive. She couldn’t keep her thoughts from turning over to the negative side. The spoon was too short for the quart container and the ice cream was frozen hard but she dug in, scraping, not wanting to wait until it softened. He was flying away at hundreds of miles per hour. Why is it, she thought, men are always hurrying away and women always waiting? There was no consolation in his reason for going. Actually, his reason was selfishly masculine, indulgent, careless, and … admirable. However, he could have stayed to fight insomnia and watch old movies and been safe with her.

Cope, detach, she advised herself. And, trying, she reviewed some of the rules she’d set for survival: Win without sympathy for the loser, never accept defeat, and never even consider surrendering. Abandon, amputate without a wince, hurt instead of be hurt no matter how much it hurt. Avoid the pitfall of the old romantic promises. Don’t let your body trap you!

New by-laws of her gender.

Keven wondered if any woman could really live up to them. She knew deep down that she couldn’t. As much as she wanted to prevent being victimized, from being unfairly forced into the old abject female role, she had to admit to a natural side of her that found virtues in those very things she resisted. Sometimes, especially lately, she thought it would be marvelous to have the courage to surrender, the confidence to just give in. Maybe she’d already had too much independence, been on her own too long. Somewhere along the line she’d come to realize there was a rock-bottom fact of life that one had to get down to sooner or later.

Aloneness.

Not to be confused with loneliness. There were many clever cures for loneliness, but aloneness was something no one could overcome. Everyone wanted to join and share, share experiences. Trying to do that, trying vainly to make up for not being able to do that, left one feeling so futile. And certainly independence didn’t help. If anything, independence left one facing aloneness alone, and who could handle that without crashing?

Maybe, thought Keven, aloneness was not without purpose. Maybe things were intentionally arranged that way to get people to depend on each other all the more, to take comfort from one another. To love. Of all the alternatives it seemed to her that love was the only possible way to offset aloneness. Not a remedy but at least it helped.

If at that moment he’d been there she would have insisted on doing his feet.

She finished the ice cream and turned on her portable television, just picture, no sound. Burt Lancaster was being an incredible pirate. She’d seen that movie three, probably four times. Nevertheless she watched intently as Burt invited danger and miraculously escaped death with chest and teeth bared.

Haz could do it, Keven thought with recharged optimism. He could come back all right.

After the movie she decided against converting the sofa into a bed because a bed would be lonelier. From the bottom drawer of an unpainted chest she got a crocheted wool afghan to cover herself. She was chilled, possibly from the ice cream. The afghan smelled of moth repellent. It had been a gift three Christmases ago from the mother, who claimed months of loving labor spent on it. But the mother had overlooked a little manufacturer’s label sewn to one corner that gave away her lie. The mother was always incriminating herself ridiculously like that, often in ways most people would consider unforgivable. Keven had long given up blaming her or hoping she’d change.

Numerous times over the years the mother had voluntarily revealed to Keven who the father was. As though it were an important secret. But each time she’d named someone different and, anyway, to Keven they were only names. Keven was convinced the mother didn’t know, hadn’t ever really known the father. An impulsive, passionate moment between two first-name-only strangers who immediately afterward had gone separate ways. Keven imagined that was the truth of it. And she was the result, thank you very much. She wasn’t bitter about it. Her compensating philosophy was that being “a child of passion” was something most people couldn’t claim. It even sounded more sensitive.

She tucked the afghan around her and lay on her side, legs drawn up, hands pressed between her thighs. She closed her eyes but didn’t go to sleep until in her mind she was sure his plane had landed at Heathrow.

She slept exceptionally deeply, longer than usual, and was proud of that. See, she told herself as she drew open the drapes to view an upright rectangle of clear sky between two buildings, see how well you can cope when you have to.

In that mood she spent what remained of the morning cleaning the apartment, and while she straightened, vacuumed and dusted, her mind kept repeating parts of a Liza Minnelli song:

It was a good time,

It was the best time …

Every so often it came out as a hum or she’d sing the first line, not really conscious of how appropriate the words might be, their past tense.

It was a good time.

In the early afternoon she went out to mail the money to the mother and take a walk anywhere. Down Lexington, window-shopping along, feeling the urge to buy but saving it. All the way to Bloomingdale’s, where she went to a crowded first-floor counter and spent nearly an hour trying on inexpensive summer hats. Various shapes and colors: precocious, head-hugging pink; icy, innocent white; floppy, worldly black. Her face in the mirror responded accordingly. She hardly saw the hats. Look at me looking at me, I’m not apparently unhappy, she thought, and after a final long, contemplative gaze into her own eyes she smiled her best soft, comforting smile to herself, causing two comma-shaped lines to appear at the corners of her mouth.

From the hats she took the escalator up and happened to notice that the bosoms of display dummies were now realistically punctuated. About time. On the fourth floor she watched a man cutting wine bottles into drinking glasses, making it appear easy, and another demonstrating a motorized tumbling rock polisher. She was immediately sold on the polisher. It would be fun to find pretty pebbles and make them shine even prettier. She remembered she already had a few she’d picked up to never forget some of the places she’d been. Charge or cash, she was asked. She paid by check. Sensibly she’d canceled all her charge accounts when she’d quit her last steady job. Take or send? The rock polisher was compact but quite heavy. However, she didn’t hesitate to say she’d take. The burden was more endurable than having to wait for something she’d already bought. The salesclerk tied a handle on it for her.

She left Bloomingdale’s via one of the Third Avenue exits and strolled down to 58th Street. There was a famous personal landmark. The Off-Track Betting parlor where she and Hazard first met. On impulse she went in to pay sentimental tribute. She wagered ten dollars on the sixth race Exacta at Aqueduct, coupling the horses’ designated letters H and K. They were both outside long shots running in a large field but, she thought, anything was possible. She tucked the OTB ticket into the snug rear pocket of her jeans, for luck.

Then back up Third. The 59th Street area was crowded, mostly with people not going anywhere. When she’d first come to the city four years before, the district around 59th had been smartly unconventional, a cleaner uptown version of downtown. But it had seen its day and was now well on its way to sleazy, spoiled dirty by being the place to go, meet, and be seen, by the invasion of too much pizza, tacky boutiques, cheap shoe stores, and even porno film theaters. East 60th was better preserved and Keven headed for it and Serendipity, where she knew she’d be able to get cold fresh-squeezed carrot juice and an organic sandwich.

She was almost there when she was approached head on, her way blocked by two conscientiously tailored Negroes. Their eyes held directly on Keven’s as they told her she was a foxy lady and advised that she should go with them because she would dig it, coke and all.

She stepped back to go around them, but they casually prevented that. She was considering a groin kick when they gave way to let her pass, their fingers snapping at the wide brims of their hats: dig it, baby, it’s your loss.

Keven knew what they were. A pair of dudes out looking to recruit another girl to their working string. It made her remember being financially desperate in California at eighteen and someone trying to persuade her to go topless for big tips. Instead, she’d taken a job as a receptionist and gone to UCLA nights. There’d been many such decisive things, but fortunately she’d always chosen the straight, if not the expedient, way to go. She was grateful for her good judgment. She believed she must have gotten it from the father. Anyway, now she was past the danger point, a survivor.

However, the encounter with the two dudes had depressed her, put a chink in her fragile good mood. The whole damned city was a mess, one endless gutter, a summer festival of dog droppings, a combat zone for the greedy insane.

She hurried to Second Avenue, took a cab to Grand Central, and just made the 4:05 Bridgeport express.

When she arrived at the installation Kersh was finishing up for the day. He was, as usual, pleased to see her. She tried to appear buoyant and animated, but Kersh saw through that. He called Julie to tell her Keven would be having dinner with them and staying the night. It was not an offhand, easy gesture, because ordinarily Kersh and Julie enjoyed being alone, spending time on one another as though it were their own precious, personal currency. Respecting that, Keven resisted the hospitality but Kersh wouldn’t have it.

He gave her a bright red crash helmet, put on a white one himself, and within minutes they were speeding over the narrow black ribbons of sideroads on the Harley-Davidson with Kersh’s hairy sheepdog Baldy chasing after them. The growl and vibrations of the old heavy motorcycle made it seem to be going faster than it really was. Keven couldn’t help being a bit apprehensive. She leaned forward against Kersh’s broad back, put her arms around him and locked her hands. Then she felt more secure, protected by his husky solidness. When they paused at a crossroad, Keven glanced back but Baldy wasn’t in sight. “What about him?” she asked, having to shout.

“He knows the way,” Kersh assured her, and roared ahead. But at the next crossroad Kersh idled until they saw the dog come over the rise some distance behind, a fluffy gray ball rolling their way. Kersh encouraged the dog with a wave and continued on. After a short way they turned off onto a dirt road and were there.

It was a three-story, wood-frame farmhouse set on enough land for privacy. Painted clean white with shutters of blue. It had a wide porch all around and there were large, old, friendly trees and lilac bushes. Set off to the right was a barn, settled askew and nicely weathered.

Julie came out to greet them. She gave Kersh a kiss on the mouth and then hugged Keven, though it was a bit awkward because she was so pregnant. Seven and a half months now, causing her long cotton skirt to hike up unevenly in front and her blouse to strain and gap from the fullness of her breasts. She was obviously very happy with her condition, glowing with a kind of self-amazement.

Baldy came lumbering in, panting, his pink tongue hanging, exhausted but needing to wag and bound around. Kersh gave a few rewarding pats and led the dog into the house for water.

“Come help me pick some lettuce for the salad,” Julie invited and Keven went with her to the rear of the house, where there was a vegetable garden neatly rowed and fenced.

It was one of Keven’s someday wishes to have a garden like that, growing fresh things she knew for certain were uncontaminated. She took the small fruit basket Julie handed her and went down between rows, eager to pick.

“It’s early lettuce,” Julie said. “This will be the first we’ve had.”

That made Keven feel that her presence was an occasion. She bent over and broke off some of the outer greener leaves of a plant, liking the crisp, healthy snap her fingers experienced. Glancing down the row she saw Julie squatted gracelessly, her reach and mobility restricted by her unborn burden. It occurred to Keven that perhaps pregnancy overcame aloneness. At least during pregnancy one was connected to another person. That could be the joy of it, a temporary relief from aloneness. Reason enough for any woman to feel special.

The thought was interrupted by the clatter of a dull bell. Across the way in a small pasture two cows were munching and swishing. “You even have your own milk.”

“Not quite yet,” Julie said lightly, and then realized Keven meant the cows. “Oh, them. They’re both old and dry.”

“They’re just for atmosphere?”

“Well, they also make valuable contributions to the garden.”

“They don’t look very friendly.”

“They’d come in the house if we’d let them.”

Keven thought she’d get acquainted with those cows if she had the chance.

At that moment Julie lost her balance. From her squatting position she toppled over backwards. Keven rushed to her, but Julie was laughing. “It happens all the time,” she said. “I’m always overcompensating for being front heavy.”

Keven helped her up. Julie slapped the dirt from her skirt as though annoyed at herself and immediately squatted to start picking again.

They had dinner out on the side porch. While they ate dusk gave way to dark and with it came the pleasant sounds of all the little night-loving creatures. Moths performed around the kerosene lamp on the table. The conversation went from one trivial subject to another.

After dinner they all helped clear the table and then returned to the porch with mugs of tea and ginger cookies. They sat on the edge with their legs over, facing the night. Below them in the grass Baldy was suddenly alert for no apparent reason. He barked twice and wandered away.

Keven said: “Animals are very telepathic, aren’t they?”

“Some seem to be,” said Kersh.

“Especially dogs,” Julie said.

“And horses,” said Keven, wondering how those two outsiders had done that afternoon at Aqueduct.

“Quite a few telepathic experiments have been done with dogs,” Kersh said. “The other day I read a paper by a Russian scientist named Bekherev. He put a thousand identical sticks of wood in a room, just scattered them around. Each stick was numbered. From a separate room he telepathically commanded a dog to go in and retrieve a particular, numbered stick. I don’t remember the exact results but about ten times out of every hundred tries the dog retrieved the right stick.”

“I’d like to try that with Haz sometime,” Keven said, entertained by the thought.

“You’d be fetching the sticks,” Kersh told her, reminding her of her receiver’s role.

“I suppose,” she said vaguely. It was the first time that night Hazard had been mentioned. They’d been avoiding the subject for her sake and now she’d done it to herself, making her feel a sharp longing for him. To pull out of it she told them, “This afternoon on the train I sat beside a very fat and nosey woman who wanted to know my life history. When she asked what I did for a living I told her I was a telepathist. Just to see what her reaction would be. She told me she had a niece who also works for the telephone company.”

That got a laugh.

“I’m always doing battle with the infidels,” said Julie.

“Infidels?” Keven was amused.

“She tries to make a believer out of everyone,” Kersh said. “Next thing she’ll be on the street shaking a tambourine and handing out leaflets.”

“I’ve converted a few,” Julie said.

“Including me,” Kersh said.

“You were easy. Your mind was wide open.”

“Half open.”

“Well, that’s half more than most people.”

“I think people experience telepathy every day and don’t realize it,” Keven said.

Julie also thought that. “They prefer to call it something else like willpower or intuition.”

“Or plain old coincidence, like two people getting the same thought at the same time. That’s happened to everyone.”

“Especially to people who are intimately involved,” Kersh said.

“Why is that?” Keven asked.

“I don’t know for sure, but it’s a piece of recurring evidence. The area of the brain that controls emotional behavior is the same area that has most to do with telepathic abilities.”

“You mean love might have something to do with telepathy?” Keven asked.

“Let’s just say it seems to help.”

“What gripes the hell out of me,” said Julie, “is the way people claim to be believers just because its fashionable. Scratch the surface and they’re really as skeptical as ever.”

“Can’t entirely blame them for that,” Kersh said. “If anyone’s to blame it’s the scientists.”

“Not all scientists,” Julie said, and gave Kersh a possessive hug.

“No, but it’s their fault for not making people more aware of how far science has gone. The average person sees and judges things according to the so-called laws of nature, disbelieving anything that doesn’t apply. Such as telepathy. Actually, compared to some recent developments in the exact sciences, telepathy seems almost ordinary. For instance, we know now about negative mass—particles of antimatter that correspond to every known particle of matter in the universe. A sort of duplicate of everything.”

Keven imagined another Keven somewhere.

“What do you think happens when an antiparticle meets its counterpart?” Kersh asked.

“They fall in love,” Julie guessed.

“Quite the contrary. They annihilate one another.”

“Figures,” Keven said.

“We also have time flowing backward and things called neutrinos that we know travel faster than the speed of light, which until only a few years ago was known to be impossible.”

“What are they called?”

“Neutrinos.”

Keven said it sounded like an Italian restaurant.

Kersh laughed. “And they’re just about as predictable. Neutrinos are particles of matter that come from space and have no respect at all for any of our rules. They pass right through solid mass as though it wasn’t there. Right at this moment billions of neutrinos are shooting through our bodies and going on their way into and all the way through the earth. Although the neutrino is matter, obviously it exists in an entirely different dimension.”

“That’s really far out,” said Julie.

“But why,” Keven said, “when scientists are involved with such fantastic things are they so set against telepathy?”

“Some of them are coming around, especially the physicists. They’re getting closer to it.”

From somewhere out in the dark, Baldy’s bark punctuated the moment.

Kersh asked Julie and Keven if they were chilled. The night air was dewy and cool, but they didn’t want to go inside yet. Kersh went in to get sweaters. He also put the London Symphony on the stereo, Vaughn Williams’ Number Six in E minor. When he came back to the porch he sat with his back against a post and Julie snuggled into the cave of his arms.

“Someday,” Julie said, “telepathy will be a regular way of communicating. People will use words only when they want to. The greedy, old telephone company, Western Union, and the post office will all be out of business and movies will be silent again.”

“And a receiver will have to marry a sender,” Kersh said.

“Not necessarily,” Kevin said. “By then probably everyone will be going both ways.”

“That seems to be the tendency,” Julie commented.

“Anyway,” said Keven, “in the future people will look back on now as the blabbering dark age.”

Kersh said he doubted that. “Chances are people may be even more talkative.”

“You mean with their minds.”

“With their mouths,” Kersh said.

“But that’s ridiculous,” said Keven. “Why should they talk even more when they’re telepathic?”

“You’re assuming—as most people do—that telephathy is a new kind of human ability that will be refined and developed along with interplanetary weekend excursions and humanoid sex partners.”

“Isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so,” Kersh said.

Julie reacted as though Kersh had committed blasphemy. In all their many discussions she’d never heard him say such a thing.

“Rather than an ability we’re developing, telepathy may be something from our evolutionary past.”

“You mean we used to be better at it?” Keven asked.

“Possibly. Anyway, there’s quite a bit of evidence in favor of such a theory.”

Julie and Keven needed convincing.

Kersh smiled and asked if they wanted the deluxe or economy lecture.

“You can stop when we start to yawn,” Julie told him.

Kersh took a moment to decide where to begin. “At best,” he said, “we can only speculate about how the human brain originated. We’ve very little to go on besides a record of fossils and there are still a lot of gaps. But by using comparative anatomy, embryology, and a few other related disciplines we can piece together a fairly accurate picture. It’s believed that man’s earliest ancestors were tiny organisms that lived in the waters of the Cambrian Seas some five hundred million years ago. We call these creatures primordial chordates. They occupied the warm surface areas of the seas, and the sunlight hit on their backs. Apparently, as a reaction, they developed a strip of sensory cells called neurons. Even now in the human embryo the first sign of development of a nervous system is the same such strip of tissue.”

Julie patted her stomach and said it was her Cambrian Sea.

“At first this strip of nerve tissue was dangerously exposed. So, for protection it rolled itself into a more rigid, tubular shape and sank into the body of the organism. Then for even more protection it was encased in a bony substance and became the spinal cord and column.”

“What does all this have to do with telepathy?” Julie asked.

“I’m getting to it.”

“Well, get, my love,” she said, snuggling.

“Next in evolutionary order came the forming of the brain. At first it was merely a swelling at the front end of the spinal cord. No more than a tiny nodule, then another and another. These three nodules would eventually be the stem on which the advanced brain would grow. But for a long period in our evolution those three earliest chambers were a sensory unit in themselves. They were our primordial brain.”

“Are we still in the water?” Keven asked.

“Probably in and out,” Kersh told her. “The question is, what functions did this old brain perform? We can determine that more or less from what we know subsequently developed from its three chambers. The forward chamber gave rise to our reasoning mechanisms, the cerebrum. Over the rear chamber was superimposed the cerebellum, which controls the body’s automatic and voluntary physical activities. And from the mid-chamber came what’s known as the tectum. For an interim period in our evolution the tectum was a highly developed visual and auditory center, but now neuroscientists say it apparently has no significant function at all.

“Keeping those evolvements in mind, it’s reasonable to suggest that the primordial brain possessed to some extent corresponding or at least related abilities. And during this primordial time there must have been some refinements, changes, evolution within evolution. Before we had eyes, no doubt we had a sense of vision and the same applies to all our other senses as well.”

“I’m beginning to see what you’re getting at,” Julie said.

So was Keven.

“Good. Well, these intermediate abilities must have been around throughout the transitional period when the old brain was giving way to the new brain. That transformation, remember, took many millions of years and before it was anywhere near complete we were already comparatively advanced creatures.”

“We didn’t have any eyes?” Keven asked incredulously.

“At a certain stage, no, not for a long while.”

“How did we see to get around?”

“We sensed,” replied Kersh. “Even today blind people learn to depend on a remnant of that ability, especially the congenitally blind who’ve never experienced sight. In primordial times we also had the advantage of built-in distance receptors that made us extremely sensitive to vibrations.”

“We still do,” said Julie.

“To a very limited degree.”

“Maybe that explains why we get spontaneous good or bad vibes from various people,” Julie said.

“What about talking?” Keven asked. “I suppose we weren’t able to talk yet back in those days.”

“No, a spoken language came much later.”

“But we did communicate.”

“No doubt,” Kersh said. “At first only the most primary things like hunger and danger.”

“And sex?”

“Maybe”—Kersh grinned—“although that seems to have always had a language all its own.”

“And no trouble expressing itself,” Julie said.

“So, as early creatures we communicated telepathically?”

“Yes,” Kersh said. “Of course, there’s no way of knowing how complex the messages were that we transmitted to one another, and actually that’s not so vital. More important is the long-term exclusive dependency we had on that method of communication. Millions of years. And even after the development of the new brain, when man’s reasoning power became more advanced, this telepathic ability didn’t just suddenly stop. We must have gone on using it for millions of years more—until it became secondary, gradually gave way to other abilities we learned to rely on.”

After a moment of silent reflection, Julie said, rather forlornly, “So today what we have of telepathy are only the leftovers.”

Kersh nodded. “It’s still there in our brains, the residual of it. Some people have more than others.”

“All that makes me is a sort of throwback,” said Keven, deflated.

“You’re still very special,” Kersh told her fondly.

“And I’m still dubious,” said Julie with renewed determination. “You said yourself this was only your theory.”

“Not mine alone, darling. Many other scientists have hit on the same premise. Freud, for one.”

“You sound pretty sure about it,” Keven said.

“Actually, you’ve been convincing me.”

“Me?”

“You and your overactive tectum.”

“I didn’t think it showed,” Keven said.

“But it does,” Kersh told her. “As much as you’ve disliked being wired up to the computer during our exercises, it has paid off. The electronic depth probes have indicated a remarkable amount of energy coming from your tectum, that mid-brain area that I told you about. But it’s not sustained activity. It comes only at certain peak times during each test. But it happens repeatedly and, according to wave measurements, always in the same pattern of phases. For a brief time just before the peak, the rest of your brain becomes dormant, as though bowing out to the tectum and its function. Afterward, for an equally brief phase there is the usual dormancy. A parenthesis. Evidently it’s during the peak, those few intense seconds, that your telepathic perception is at work.”

Baldy interrupted, came like a fluffy ghost out of the night with his legs and underside wet from an adventure in tall grass.

Coincidentally the London Symphony played its last, long note.

“And that, children, is it for tonight,” Kersh said. “My hip’s gone to sleep and the rest of me wants to.”

They went in to bed.

Keven managed to get to sleep with her arms around a big feather pillow.

The next morning she looked out her bedroom window and saw the two cows just below. She tried to will them to look up to her but they wouldn’t. At breakfast she found in the sports section of the New York Times that the sixth at Aqueduct was won by a head by the letter-H horse. The K-horse had run next to last. She told herself it wasn’t significant. Julie invited her to stay for the day, but Keven declined and rode with Kersh to the installation.

First thing, she went down to the beach house. It had a shut-up tight smell so she opened all the windows. She thought about tidying the place but decided she’d leave things as they were—Hazard’s deck sneakers caked with dry sand in a corner by the door, his sunglasses on the table and some old racing forms, one of his shirts thrown over the back of a chair, a cup he’d drunk from, the bed unmade from the last time.

She sat on the floor and unpacked the electric rock polisher. After reading the instructions twice she assembled it. Then she changed into shorts cut from an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Taking along a shoe box, she went out to the beach to walk along the water’s edge, searching for pebbles. She almost succeeded in losing herself in that pleasant diversion and by mid-afternoon she’d walked two miles down coast and collected half a boxful. Back at the beach house she sorted through the pebbles, selected only the best according to symmetry and hue. Like small hopes she’d preserve and make brighter, she thought, and put them into the polisher’s metal canister along with the powdered pumice and the right amount of water, according to instructions. When she switched on the polisher the canister rotated and the pebbles tumbling inside made an irritating rattling noise. The complete polishing process was supposed to take seven days. She hoped it wouldn’t really take that long.

Shortly before seven o’clock she went up to the main house for the first overseas exercise, and at seven precisely she was ready to receive. After Kersh’s talk the night before she was more conscious than ever of what she was doing but also more confident that she could do it. The whole idea of telepathy seemed less vague now—a natural mental function.

But when the exercise was over she believed she’d missed for some reason. Instead of a single clear image, she’d received what appeared to be a sort of composite: a blue background with a white horizontal figure floating in its center. At first she thought it was an angel, but after studying it a while she wasn’t sure. Maybe it was a white bird with woman-like configurations, or maybe a white female with birdlike features. It was, thought Keven, too ambiguous to be correct.

For the next two days she was restless, constantly on edge. To keep occupied she helped Kersh in the laboratory and did some typing and filing for him. He invited her home but she preferred to stay alone at the beach house.

The nights were especially bad. She sat out on the steps for hours looking to sea, and all the while the damned rock polisher churned noisily away.

Now, finally, it was time for the second exercise. The watch said exactly seven o’clock. The sketch pad was on her lap, the crayons spread out and ready. She relaxed and let her mind go. It raced and opened, reached its receptive phase. Blank white waiting for impression. Nothing came.

Keven felt herself panic, fearing the worst—that Hazard might not be sending, might never again.

She controlled herself and made another attempt, summoning up all her feeling for him, picturing him, fragmented—his hands nice, eyes nice, ears and hair nice, mouth nice, and all the other nice parts of him, and then him altogether. Him. She tried intensely to visualize where he was that instant, how he was. She had to know.

Moments later, when she glanced down at the sketch pad she saw she’d made a large green angry X. It was not an image he’d sent. It was her protest. Maybe, she thought, she’d let her imagination get out of control. But one thing for certain: She was no longer worried about his safety. She now felt only exasperation and a need to fight.

She went down the slope to the beach house. She quickly gathered up everything of his and threw them into the closet. She kicked the electric rock polisher’s cord out of the socket and put fresh sheets on the bed.