knew at once that he must be the one who had escaped the previous
afternoon. The description was out — dark, crop-haired, whiteskinned, apparently about fifteen though he was five years older. He half lay, propped against the trunk of the willow, gazing at me without
any expression at all. Eerie! You’ll have heard of expressionless faces
but have you ever seen one? It could have been a mask he wore.
I know I made some sort of frightened noise and stood still, panicking. Then I turned to run, to call the police or Derek or anyone I could find, but I didn’t get two paces. He was on me like a snake. From
reclining he crossed five metres while I turned and began to run, spun
me by the arm and threw me down under the tree. He seemed
tremendously strong. He sat down beside me and gripped my wrist
and hit me, not very hard but hard enough to stop me struggling, and
On the nursery floor
177
he said — I’ll never forget him saying it, like a remark about the
weather — If you call out I will kill you. I have no inhibition against
killing.’
It was like being addressed by a mechanical doll, programmed to
say exactly so much and shut up. So we sat there, he withdrawn into
his thoughts but holding my wrist and breathing heavily. You know
how the surface of your mind continues to work although you are
scared stiff? I was thinking how clever of me it was to work out why he
breathed so heavily. Derek had told me that the children could control their autonomic systems to some extent, and so could move with terrific speed and power for a short time; then, of course, they had to
phase themselves back to normal metabolic rate, and that was what
Young Feller was doing.
Then I thought that Derek wore uniform when he left the Project
site, and a gun was part of it. He would hold the boy up and march
him back home.
Young Feller said, ‘Don’t depend on Derek,’ and my face must have
been a study because his mask cracked like an imitation grin. ‘How
else would you think? We are both waiting for him.’
That meant that Derek had talked about us to this monster. Men!
Then he just ignored me. Nothing Derek had told me had given a
true idea of the nature of the children; I had thought of them as extensions of my own idea of cleverness, as cunning brats, lightning calculators, quick off the mark with quirky ideas. Now I saw and heard —
a man? a person? a — what? Someone who wasn’t worth the trouble
of making explanation to, a thing dealt with and shelved, worse than
being ignored. Someone ignoring you at least knows that you exist;
this was like being a piece taken off the board and forgotten.
In spite of being frightened — or perhaps because of it — I started
to spit words at him. ‘You can’t hide. You’ll be caught. You burned
people!’
He hadn’t forgotten, of course, only withdrawn. With a bit of his
attention he squeezed my wrist and hurt me and said, ‘Noise! Your
fault if I kill you!’
I was too confused with fear and rage to be sensible. I hissed at him,
‘I’m a person, not a thing!’
He smiled, a smile of real amusement at the creature’s antics. ‘Then
remember that cowardice is a survival trait.’ And he hit me across the
mouth, hard enough to cut my lip on a tooth, and removed the bit of
his mind again. God knows what thinking went on in his nice-looking
teenager head, but it penetrated at last that I could die and that I
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George Turner
didn’t want to.
Soon I heard Derek coming, whistling, feet scuffling on the steep
little track leading down to the creek. I saw him like a shadow on the
drapes of the outer trees. Then Young Feller hurt my wrist so badly
that I screamed and Derek came running. He was a martial arts
expert and very fast but he didn’t stand a chance against the boy’s
boosted speed. Young Feller crossed the space like something from a
catapult, at full speed in the instant of motion. He kicked Derek in the
knee and struck his neck as he fell forward, and didn’t move.
I kept on screaming but it no longer mattered; there was no one to
hear.
The boy stripped Derek naked and then himself and put on Derek’s
uniform. He was not quite big enough to fill the uniform and the boots
were too large but he managed well enough. He weighed Derek’s gun
in his hand, examined the mechanism, thought for a fraction of a
second and threw it down. He didn’t need a gun.
He stood for a moment looking down at my naked lover and then
did something quite chilling. He bent to ruffle Derek’s hair, and said,
‘There, Derry boy; you’ll be all right tomorrow.’
He looked at me with what I can only call a tolerant expression and
paid what he thought were compliments. ‘A beautiful specimen, isn’t
he? A fine strain.’ That was true; Derek, naked, was beautiful. ‘I’d like
to keep him but it could be difficult.’ He seemed almost regretful.
‘There’s comfort of a kind in an unquestioning love that asks no more
than
