All we outside staff at Project IQ_ were Special Services men. I did
three stints there, so I knew the Group C kids over a period of sixteen
years off and on, and Conrad fastened on to me from my first days,
when he was only four.
With hindsight it’s easy to say that the kids played us all for fools and
never had the slightest feeling for any of us, but it isn’t true. I know that
Conrad liked me in his fashion. It’s nothing to be proud of because it
didn’t mean that we were friends, only that he had some sort of feeling for me. I love dogs and horses, and that is more or less the way he felt about me. So I think. There’s no way of being sure.
The other kids noticed me sometimes, but only in passing. I think
that Young Feller adopted me as his study and-the others recognised
priority. I called him Young Feller and he took it for his name. Said
Conrad sounded like gears clashing. One of the B Group girls opted
for Jesus Bloody Christ because she said it suited her personality, but
that was discouraged. We never knew whether it was a joke or not. I
think it was.
But you want to know about Young Feller. I can’t tell you much that
isn’t in the literature.
You already have. Nobody else has described what being liked by him was
like. Devastating to discover that he was all fagade, as penetrable as a dog
might find its master? But a dog never realises that he is not a loving equal.
Derek is strong enough to ’know his place’ without rancour. That takes a lot of
strength.
The most I can do is confirm what happened at the Project site. The
official versions of the breakout are mostly face-saving because
On the nursery floor
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nobody wanted to admit to being so easily fooled. It’s ridiculous, looking back on it; the teams devoted their lives to producing genius and then were ashamed to admit that their proteges out-thought them. We
blur every reality with emotions and vanities.
I’d been eighteen months on my third tour of duty when it happened. The Group C kids were twenty years old and nobody knew what to do with them. A and B Groups had gone out into the public
world four years before. Those Groups weren’t failures but neither
were they so intelligent that the simple human world was beyond
them; they were capable of fitting in. I believe they did very well in
their particular lines once the publicity had died down.
An understatement. A Group revolutionised the theory of logic and turned
half of philosophy on its rational ear, but not to the point of being incomprehensible. B Group have been iess prominent as artists because their work is harder to grasp, but not so hard that a few can't see where they are heading. They are
successes, but the kinds of successes we halfwits can cope with. Group C was
too successful. A complete failure.
The breakout followed a simple, obvious pattern and none of us saw
it forming. The two girls started their escape attempts when they were
eighteen, which was when their menstrual periods began. They were
all physically retarded and looked about thirteen. They were silly attempts, bound to fail, and their rebelliousness and general cussedness
— they could make the place hell when it suited them — were put
down to menstrual tension.
They never meant to escape. They were only testing the security
points until they knew as much about them as the designers. When
they knew enough, they recovered from ‘menstrual tension’ and let the
staff settle back into routine. M eaning complacency.
I was there and never suspected a thing. They knew how to distract
us in simple-minded ways. That was how they rated our mentalities.
And they had the patience to wait on a long-term plan. Their opportunity came in twenty-twenty-four, their twentieth year.
You’d be too young to remember but that was the climax of the
decade when the greenhouse effect really made itself felt, when summer stretched through autum n and the weather patterns began to frighten us. The northern half of Australia drowned in tropical rainfall
while the southern half baked in twelve years of near drought.
How they do run on about the drought years, like old soldiers showing their
scars. So it was terrible. So they suffered. So what’s new in history?
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George Turner
I was playing at head gardener that time and the job was heartbreak. We had had just a little winter rain, enough to let the grass get up twelve or fifteen centimetres, so there were two hectares of pasture
round the Project buildings. We intended to let Farmer Tebbutt’s prize
herd in rather than cut it but the hot spell caught us wrong-footed. In
a week all we had was grass drying out and hot west winds blowing to
melt the ground.
We don’t know which of the kids started the grass fire but we know
how it was done — with some broken bottle glass and cleaning fluid
filched from the Maintenance Store. Simplicity again, when we were
alert for cunning. It started on the west side of the complex, where the
wind would fan it, just far enough back to be sure it would sweep right
round the buildings. They were safe with their internal sprinklers,
stone construction and surrounding driveways, but of course we all
turned out to fight the grass fire — with old-fashioned beaters because
we had nothing else.
All of us except the four kids. They went into hysterics of fright.
They had never been in danger
