by James Gunn
Coming from this blonde creature, the incongruity set Matt to laughing. Abbie stared with wide eyes. "Did I say something wrong?" she asked plaintively.
"No." Matt got out and led her toward the door.
"You got to tell me," Abbie said appealingly. "There's so much I don't know."
Matt located the most expensive restaurant in town. It had a romantic atmosphere but he had chosen it because it specialized in sea food. He wanted to be sure that Abbie had things to eat she had never tasted before.
Matt ordered for both of them: shrimp cocktail, assorted relishes, chefs salad with Roquefort dressing, broiled lobster tails with drawn butter, french fried potatoes, broccoli with a cheese sauce, frozen éclair, coffee. The food was good, and Abbie ate everything with great wonderment, as if it were about to disappear into the mysterious place from which it came.
She stared wide-eyed at the room and its decorations and the other diners and the waiter, and seemed oblivious of the fact that other men were staring admiringly at her. The waiter puzzled her. "Is this all he does?" she asked timidly. Matt nodded. "He's very good at it," Abbie conceded.
"Try to move the coffee cup," Matt said when they finished.
Abbie stared at it for a moment. "I can't," she said softly. "I tried awful -- very hard, but I can't. I'd do anything you wanted, Mr. Wright, but I can't do that."
Matt smiled. "That's all right. I just wanted to see if you could."
Matt found a place they could dance. He ordered a couple of drinks. Abbie sipped hers once, made a face, and wouldn't touch it again.
She danced lightly and gracefully in her high-heeled shoes. They brought the top of her head level with his lips. She rested her head blissfully against his shoulder and pressed herself very close. For a moment Matt relaxed and let himself enjoy the pleasures of the aftermath of a good meal and a beautiful girl in his arms. But Abbie seemed to be in a private Eden of her own, as if she had entered a paradise and was afraid to speak for fear the spell would break.
During the long drive home, she spoke only once. "Do people live like that all the time?"
"No," Matt said. "Not always. Not unless they have a lot money."
Abbie nodded. '~rhat's the way it should be," she said softly. "It should only happen a long ways apart."
When they reached the cabin, Matt reached into the back seat for the package he had bought.
"What's that?" Abbie asked.
"Open it," Matt said.
She held it up a little, lacy and black in the moonlight. Then she turned to look at Matt, her face transparent, her eyes glowing."Wait out here a minute, will you?" she asked breathlessly.
"All right." Matt lit a cigarette and stood on the porch looking out over the valley, hating himself.
After a few minutes, he heard a little whisper. "Come in, Mr. Wright."
He opened the door, started in and stopped, stunned. One kerosene lamp lit the room dimly. The new clothes were draped carefully over the edge of a chair. Abbie was wearing the negligee. That was all. Through its lacy blackness she gleamed pink and white, a lovely vision of seductiveness. She stood by the table, staring at the floor. When she looked up, her cheeks were flushed.
Suddenly she ran lightly across the floor and threw her arms around Matt's neck and kissed him hard on the lips. Her lips moved. She drew back a little, looking up at him.
"There's only one way a girl like me can thank a man for a day as wonderful as this," she whispered. "For the clothes and the trip and the dinner and the dancing. And for being so nice. I never thought anything like this would ever happen to me, I don't mind. I guess it isn't bad when you really like someone. I like you awful -- very well. I'm glad they made me pretty. If I can make you happy -- just for a moment -- "
Gently, feeling sick, Matt took her hands from around his neck. "You don't understand," he said coldly. "I've done a terrible thing. I don't know how you can ever forgive me. Somehow you misunderstood me. Those clothes; the negligee -- they're for another girl -- the girl I'm going to marry -- my fiancée. You're about her size and I thought -- I don't know how I could have misled . . . "
He stopped. It was enough. His plan had worked. Abbie had crumpled. Slowly, as he spoke, the life had drained out of her, the glow had fled from bet face, and she seemed to shrink in upon herself, cold and broken. She was a little girl, slapped across the face in her most spiritual moment by the one person she had trusted most.
"That's all right," she said faintly. "Thanks for letting me think they was mine -- that it was for me -- only for a little. I'll never forget."
She turned and went to the bunk and let the blanket fall back around her.
It was the sobbing that kept Matt from going to sleep that night. Or maybe it was the way the sobs were so soft and muffled that he had to strain to hear them.
Breakfast was a miserable meal. There was something wrong with the food, although Matt couldn't quite pin down what it was. Everything was cooked just the same, but the flavor was gone. Matt cut and chewed mechanically and tried to avoid looking at Abbie. It wasn't difficult; she seemed very small today, and she kept her eyes on the floor.
She was dressed in the shapeless blue gingham once more. She toyed listlessly with her food. Her face was scrubbed free of make-up, and everything about her was dull. Even her newly blonde hair had faded.
Several times Matt opened his mouth to apologize again, and shut it without saying anything. Finally he cleared his throat and said, "Where's your new frying pan?"
She looked up for the first time. Her blue eyes were cloudy. "I put it away," she said lifelessly, "do you want it back?"
"No, no," Matt said hurriedly. "I was Just asking."
Silence fell again, like a sodden blanket. Matt sat and chain-smoked while Abbie cleaned up the table and washed the dishes.
When she finished she turned around with her back to the dishpan. "Do you want me to move things for you? I can do it real good today."
Matt saw the little pile of packages in the corner and noticed for the first time that the new clothes were gone. He steeled himself. "How do you know?"
"I got a feeling."
"Do you mind?"
"I don't mind. I don't mind anything." She came forward and sat down in the chair. "Look!"
The table between them lifted, twisted, tilted on one leg, and crashed on its side to the floor.
"How did you feel?" Matt said excitedly. "Can you control the power? Was the movement accidental?"
"It felt like it was kind of a part of me," Abbie said. "Like my hand. But I didn't know exactly what it was going to do."
"Wait a minute," Matt said. "I'm going to get some things out of the car. Maybe we can learn a little more about what makes you able to do things like this. You don't mind, do you?"
"What's the good of it?" she asked listlessly.
Matt dashed out to the car and pulled the two cartons of equipment out of the trunk. He carried them into the shack and laid the apparatus out on the table. He went back to the car and brought in the bathroom scales he'd bought in the drugstore in Springfield.
"All right, Abbie. First, let's find out a few things about you before we try moving anything else."
Abbie complied automatically while he took her temperature and pulse, measured her blood pressure and weighed her. "I wish I could set up controls to measure your basal metabolism," he muttered as he worked, "but this will have to do. I wish this shack had a generator."
"I could get you electricity," Abbie said without much interest.
"Hmmm -- you could at that, I guess. But that would make these tests meaningless, if you had to devote energy to keeping the equipment running."
He cursed the limited knowledge that was undoubtedly making him miss things that a man who had studied longer would have known more about.
But there wasn't anything he could do about that. Once he'd reached some preliminary conclusions, more experienced researchers could take over the job.
Working, carefu
lly, he wrote down the results.
"Now, Abbie, would you please pick that chair up off the floor, and hold it up for a few minutes? No -- I mean really go over and pick it up."
He let her hold it for exactly five minutes, then ran her through the same tests as before, noting the changes in temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, respiration, and then he weighed her again.
"All right. Take a rest now. We'll have to wait until these readings drop down to what they were before we do anything else," Matt said.
Still not displaying anything more than acquiescence, Abbie sat down in another chair and stared at the floor.
"Abbie, do you mind helping me?" Matt asked. "It's for your benefit, too. If you can control these powers all the time, maybe the fellows around here will stop breaking legs and falling into lakes."
Abbie's dull expression did not change. "I don't care," she said.
Matt sighed. For a moment, he considered dropping his experiments and just getting out of Abbie's life -- packing his thesis notes and typewriter in the car and driving back to the university. But he couldn't stop now. He was too close to the beginnings of an answer.
He checked Abbie again, and found his readings coincided with the first set. The short rest had dropped her heartbeat and respiration back to normal.
"Let's try all over again," Matt said. "Lift that chair to the same height you were holding it, please."
The chair jerked upward, hesitantly. "Easy. Just a little more." It straightened, then moved more steadily. "Hold it there." The chair hovered motionless in the air, maintaining its position. Matt waited five minutes. "All right. Let it down easy. Slow." The chair settled gently to the floor, like a drifting feather.
Once more, he checked Abbie.
Her heartbeat was below what it had been. Her blood pressure was lower. Her respiration was shallow -- her breast was barely rising to each breath. Her temperature was low -- dangerously so, for an ordinary human being.
"How do you feel?" he asked apprehensively. If this was what always happened, then Abbie was in real danger every time she used her powers.
"All right," she said with no more than her previous disinterest. Matt frowned, but she was showing no signs of discomfort.
"Are you sure?" he asked.
"Yes," she said. "You want me to try some more?"
"If you're sure you're not in danger. But I want you to stop if you feel any pain or if you're uncomfortable. Now, lift the table just this far . . . "
They practiced with the table for an hour. At the end of that time, Abbie had it under perfect control. She could raise it a fraction of an inch or rocket it to the ceiling where it would remain, legs pointing stiffly toward the floor, until she lowered it. She balanced it on one leg and set it spinning like a top.
Distance did not seem to diminish Abbie's control or power. She could make the table perform equally well from any point in the room, from outside the cabin, or from a point to which she shuffled dispiritedly several hundred yards down the road.
"How do you know where it is and what it's doing?" Matt asked, frowning.
Abbie shrugged listlessly. "I just feel it."
"With what?" Matt asked. "Do you see it? Feel it? Sense it? If we could isolate the sense -- "
"It's all of those," Abbie said.
Matt shook his head in frustration. "You look a little tired. You'd better lie down."
She lay in her bunk, not moving, her face turned to the wall, but Matt knew that she wasn't asleep. When she didn't get up to fix lunch, Matt opened a can of soup and tried to get her to eat some of it.
"No, thanks, Mr. Wright," Abbie said. "I ain't hungry."
"I'm not hungry," Matt corrected.
Abbie didn't respond. In the evening she got out of her bunk to fix supper, but she didn't eat more than a few mouthfuls. After she washed the dishes, she went back into her bunk and pulled the blanket around it.
Matt sat up,. trying to make sense out of his charts. Despite their readings, Abbie hadn't reacted dangerously to what should have been frightening physiological changes. He could be fairly safe in assuming that they always accompanied the appearance of her parapsychological powers -- and she had certainly lived through those well enough.
But why was there such a difference in the way she reacted when she was happy and when she wasn't? The first morning, when she had barely been able to assume conscious control, she'd been ravenously hungry. Today, when she had performed feats that made the others insignificant she was neither hungry nor abnormally exhausted. She was tired, yes, but there had been a measurable, though slight, expenditure of energy with each action, which, accumulated through their numerous experiments, could be expected to equal that required for an afternoon's normal work.
What was different? Why, when she tried with what amounted to will-power alone, was it harder for her to move an object telekinetically than it would have been to do so physically? Why was the reverse true when she was unhappy?
Unless she was tapping a source of energy somewhere.
The thought sounded as though there might be something behind it. He reached for a blank sheet of paper and began jotting down ideas.
Disregarding the first morning's experiments, when she was obviously succeeding despite this hypothetical force, what source of energy could she be contacting?
Well, what physical laws was she violating? Gravity? Inertia?
When Abbie was unhappy, she could nullify gravity -- no, not exactly gravity -- mass. Once she had done that, a process that might not require much energy at all, the object rose by itself, and, having no mass, could be pushed around easily. Somehow, by some unconscious mechanism, she could restore measured amounts of mass and -- there was an idea trying to come to the surface of his thinking -- of course! The energy created by the moving or falling body when mass was restored and gravity reasserted itself was channeled into her body. She stopped being a chemical engine sustained by food burned in the presence of oxygen, and became a receiver for the power generated by the moving bodies.
Writing quickly, he systematized what he had learned. Obviously, the energy restored when the manipulated objects fell or swooped back into place couldn't quite balance the energy required to move them. She did get tired -- but nowhere near as tired as she should have been. If she empathized with her feelings at such times, she retained a bare margin of control even when happy, but she lost the delicate ability to tap the energy thus liberated, and had to draw on her own body for the power.
Matt grimaced. If that was true -- and his charts and graph confirmed it, then she ceuld never use her powers unless she was miserable.
And the key to that lay buried in the childhood of a little hill girl, who probably had been scolded and beaten, as hill children were when they were bad. In this case "bad" meaning a little girl who could move things without touching them, who had been confronted with the example of "Libby," the perfect little girl who would always have minded her mother, until she had come to associate the use of her powers only with unhappiness, with not being wanted, with rejection on the part of the people whom she loved.
Matt winced. 'You louse, Wright!'
But it was too late to do anything about it now. He had to go on with what he was doing.
Abbie's appetite wasn't any better in the morning. She looked tired, too, as if she hadn't slept. Matt stared at her for a moment thoughtfully, then shrugged and put her to work.
In a few minutes, Abbie could duplicate her feats with the table of the day before with a control that was, if anything, even finer. Matt extended his experiment to her subjective reactions.
"Let's isolate the source," he said. "Relax. Try to do it with the mind alone. Will the table to move."
Matt jotted down notes. At the end of half an hour he had the following results:
Mind alone -- negative.
Body alone -- negative.
Emotions alone -- negative.
It was crude and uncertain. It would take days or months of
practice to be able to use the mind without a sympathetic tension of the body, or to stop thinking or to wall off an emotion. But Matt was fairly sure that the telekinetic ability was a complex of all three and perhaps some others that he had no way of knowing about, which Abbie couldn't describe. But if any of the primary three were inhibited, consciously or unconsciously, Abbie could not move a crumb of bread.
Two of them could be controlled. The third was a product of environment and circumstances. Abbie had to be unhappy.
A muscle twitched in Matt's jaw, and he told Abbie to try moving more than one object. He saw a cup of coffee rise in the air, turn a double somersault without spilling a drop, and sit down gently in the saucer that climbed to meet it. Matt stood up, picked the cup out of the air, drank the coffee, and put the cup back. The saucer did not wobble.