said G.G. “Well. So that’s where you’ve been. You could at least have let me know.” There was grudging approval beneath his gruffness. “Say, how’d you know I needed this today, anyhow?”
“Didn’t,” said Lucilla, putting her purse away and whisking the cover off her typewriter. “Happenstance, that’s all.” (Just happened to go down to the library ... for no reason at all ... withholding something ... get out of the way....) The telephone’s demand for attention overrode her thoughts. She reached for it almost gratefully. “Mr. Hoskins’ office,” she said. “Yes. Yes, he knows about the ten o’clock meeting this morning. Thanks for calling, anyway.” She hung up and glanced at G.G., but he was so immersed in one of the magazines that the ringing telephone hadn’t even disturbed him. Ringing? The last thing she did before she left the office each night was set the lever in the instrument’s base to “off,” so that the bell would not disturb G.G. if he worked late. So far today, nobody had set it back to “on.”
*
It’s getting worse,” she said miserably to the pale blue ceiling. “The phone didn’t ring this morning—it couldn’t have—but I answered it.” Dr. Andrews said nothing at all. She let her eyes flicker sidewise, but he was outside her range of vision. “I don’t LIKE having you sit where I can’t see you,” she said crossly. “Freud may have thought it was a good idea, but I think it’s a lousy one.” She clenched her hands and stared at nothing. The silence stretched thinner and thinner, like a balloon blown big, until the temptation to rupture it was too great to resist. “I didn’t see the truck this morning. Nor hear it. There was no reason at all for me to slow down and pull over.”
“You might be dead if you hadn’t. Would you like that better?”
The matter-of-fact question was like a hand laid across Lucilla’s mouth. “I don’t want to be dead,” she admitted finally. “Neither do I want to go on like this, hearing words that aren’t spoken and bells that don’t ring. When it gets to the point that I pick up a phone just because somebody’s thinking....” She stopped abruptly.
“I didn’t quite catch the end of that sentence,” Dr. Andrews said.
“I didn’t quite finish it. I can’t.”
“Can’t? Or won’t? Don’t hold anything back, Lucilla. You were saying that you picked up the phone just because somebody was thinking....” He paused expectantly. Lucilla reread the ornate letters on the framed diploma on the wall, looked critically at the picture of Mrs. Andrews—whom she’d met—and her impish daughter—whom she hadn’t—counted the number of pleats in the billowing drapes, ran a tentative finger over the face of her wristwatch, straightened a fold of her skirt ... and could stand the silence no longer.
“All right,” she said wearily. “The girl at Karry Karton thought about talking to me, and I heard my phone ring, even though the bell was disconnected. G.G. thought about needing backup material for the conference and I went to the library. The truck driver thought about warning people and I got out of his way. So I can read people’s minds—some people’s minds, some of the time, anyway ... only there’s no such thing as telepathy. And if I’m not telepathic, then....” She caught herself in the brink of time and bit back the final word, fighting for self-control.
“Then what?” The peremptory question toppled Lucilla’s defenses.
“I’m crazy,” she said. Speaking the word released all the others dammed up behind it. “Ever since I can remember, things like this have happened—all at once, in the middle of doing something or saying something, I’d find myself thinking about what somebody else was doing or saying. Not thinking—knowing. I’d be playing hide-and-seek, and I could see the places where the other kids were hiding just as plainly as I could see my own surroundings. Or I’d be worrying over the answers to an exam question, and I’d know what somebody in the back of the room had decided to write down, or what the teacher was expecting us to write. Not always—but it happened often enough so that it bothered me, just the way it does now when I answer a question before it’s been asked, or know what the driver ahead of me is going to do a split second before he does it, or win a bridge game because I can see everybody else’s hand through his own eyes, almost.”
“Has it always ... bothered you, Lucilla?”
“No-o-o-o.” She drew the word out, considering, trying to think when it was that she hadn’t felt uneasy about the unexpected moments of perceptiveness. When she was very little, perhaps. She thought of the tiny, laughing girl in the faded snaps of the old album—and suddenly, inexplicably, she was that self, moving through remembered rooms, pausing to collect a word from a boyish father, a thought from a pretty young mother. Reluctantly, she closed her eyes against that distant time. “Way back,” she said, “when I didn’t know any better, I just took it for granted that sometimes people talked to each other and that sometimes they passed thoughts along without putting them into words. I was about six, I guess, when I found out it wasn’t so.” She slipped into her six-year-old self as easily as she had donned the younger Lucilla. This time she wasn’t in a house, but high on a hillside, walking on springy pine needles instead of prosaic carpet.
“Talk,” Dr. Andrews reminded her, his voice so soft that it could almost have come from inside her own mind.
“We were picnicking,” she said. “A whole lot of us. Somehow, I wandered away from the others....” One minute the hill was bright with sun, and the next it was deep in shadows and the wind that had been merely cool was downright cold. She shivered and glanced around expecting her mother to be somewhere near, holding out a sweater or jacket. There was no one at all in sight. Even then, she never thought of being frightened. She turned to retrace her steps. There was a big tree that looked familiar, and a funny rock behind it, half buried in the hillside. She was trudging toward it, humming under her breath, when the worry thoughts began to reach her. (... only a little creek so I don’t think she could have fallen in ... not really any bears around here ... but she never gets hurt ... creek ... bear ... twisted ankle ... dark ... cold....) She had veered from her course and started in the direction of the first thought, but now they were coming from all sides and she had no idea at all which way to go. She ran wildly then, first one way, then the other, sobbing and calling.
“Lucilla!” The voice sliced into the night, and the dark mountainside and the frightened child were gone. She shuddered a little, reminiscently, and put her hand over her eyes.
“Somebody found me, of course. And then Mother was holding me and crying and I was crying, too, and telling her how all the different thought at once frightened me and mixed me up. She ... she scolded me for ... for telling fibs ... and said that nobody except crazy people thought they could read each other’s minds.”
“I see,” said Dr. Andrews, “So you tried not to, of course. And anytime you did it again, or thought you did, you blamed it on coincidence. Or luck.”
“And had that nightmare again.”
“Yes, that, too. Tell me about it.”
“I already have. Over and over.”
“Tell me again, then.”
“I feel like a fool, repeating myself,” she complained. Dr. Andrew’s made no comment. “Oh, all right. It always starts with me walking down a crowded street, surrounded by honking cars and yelling newsboys and talking people. The noise bothers me and I’m tempted to cover my ears to shut it out, but I try to ignore it, instead, and walk faster and faster. Bit by bit, the buildings I pass are smaller, the people fewer, the noise less. All at once, I discover
