personality’ bit is a barrel of laughs. Three husbands and a doubtful acquittal
of murder and ‘sedate she tells me! No wonder the psychs never understood
the children; we human beings don't even understand each other. And our
punishment for it is the world we deserve. Yet she looks the part - fattish, garrulous, the clumsy kind who knocks ornaments off tables but whom neighbours say is ‘marvellous with children; She probably is. Why not?
C Group were kept apart from A and B. Oh, you know that? They
were less developed physically and the A and B kids were apt to be
rough, besides which they didn’t like the Cs. Said they were snotty.
The Cs weren’t talking but we could tell they just weren’t interested in
the others, as though they didn’t matter enough to be recognised.
As for not speaking, they had a whole language of little signs
between themselves, so little that for a long time we didn’t recognise
communication. A shift of the eyes, the barest flick of a gesture, a
change of breathing, things like that. But with us nurses they used big,
extravagant gestures to tell us what they wanted; they’d throw their
little arms around our necks and nuzzle, tug the way they wanted to
go, mimic drinking a glass of milk or playing with a toy. The psychologists said they were bilingual, using theatrical gestures for us and a
On the nursery floor
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more subtle system between themselves.
Then you’d see them asleep, sucking their thumbs like ordinary
kids; at other times you’d catch them watching you with the most
peculiar expression, intent, as though you were a study that had to be
mastered. The look would go as soon as you caught it; they would
laugh and want to play and you’d wonder if you’d really seen anything
strange.
Anecdotes? Oh, lots. I can tell you one about Conrad — he was the
one who caused all the trouble later — that will show you what they
were like. You’ll have to excuse some of the words I use, which in the
normal course I wouldn’t, but I am only quoting, remember.
And loving it. You don’t get much opportunity to use them these days, what
with the neighbours and all.
It was the day he lost his temper with me. He was just four. He was
alone on the verandah, looking out through the wire, watching Derek,
the new gardener. I knew it was Conrad by the little tattoo behind his
ear. Not that it m attered because all four of them behaved exactly
alike.
I came from behind and he cert ainly heard me because their senses
were sharp, much sharper than ours, but the hunch of his shoulders
told me that his eyes would have that look, as if his mind was taking
Derek to pieces and putting him together again. Learning him. It could
be creepy. But it was mealtime and it had been one of those mornings
and I suppose I was a little sharp. Anyway, I said, ‘Come on, Conrad,
upsy!’
He didn’t let on that he heard me, and that was unusual. Normally
they would come to life and fall all over us with love and fun. ‘Keeping on the right side of us,’ the psychologists said, and it turned out there was something in that. This day I was in no mood for holdups,
so I said, ‘Dinnertime, Conrad! Come on, now!’
I took him under the armpits and lifted him and tossed him because
he liked that, and turned him to face me and found a little animal in
my hands, throwing its limbs about and struggling and screaming at
me the first words it had ever spoken.
‘Fuck off, Blaikie! Can’t you tell by now when I’m thinking!’
I don’t know whether it was shock or what, but I put him down on
the floor and my hands over my mouth and absolutely squealed with
laughter. It seemed the funniest, wickedest thing I had ever heard.
After a minute he saw the joke, too, but he saw it like an adult and
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George Turner
his laugh was intimate, as though we shared a secret. But we didn’t
and he knew it, because he toddled across to one of the bugged pillars
that he wasn’t supposed to know anything about and said right into the
microphone spot, ‘Now I suppose we’ll have to waste time answering
your bloody questions!’
And so they did, but it seems that what the psychs learned was Group C’s
ability to hear no question they didn’t see fit to answer. The teams were loath to
use coercion because they didn’t know what they were dealing with and might
have distorted the personalities. They learned just what the kids allowed them
to.
3 Derek, the gardener among other things
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
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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 becaus
e 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 before and their reactions were
extreme.
So we thought. Afterwards, we saw how they had managed to
hinder us until a couple of small outrushes became walls of flame racing over the grass. It reached the eastern perimeter hedge, moving so fast that one of my gardeners, who was coming on duty and taking a
short cut from the guardhouse, was caught by it as he ran.
It hit the eucalypts round the guardhouse and they exploded the
way they do when the sap catches. The guardhouse went up and the
whole of the perimeter hedge on that side. The power to the concealed
fence was cut as the terminals melted free and the whole security system was exposed. It was easy to penetrate when you could see it.
There was an offiduty soldier in the guardhouse, sleeping; he burned
alive. The fire leapt the road and raged into the tinderbox pasture
round the Tebbutt homestead and burned his small herd of tortured
cattle before the Country Fire Authority could do more than reach the
scene.
In the middle of it all Young Feller strolled to freedom through the
west perimeter, walking at his leisure.
The other three went into crocodile lamentations, but by this time
we were putting ideas together and they knew it. And mocked us. Not
openly, but the cool contempt was there. They had what they wanted:
one of their num ber out in the world. A vanguard observer of the
savages in habitat. They knew their value; they knew nothing puni
On the nursery floor
175
tive could be done to them. But they were wrong about that.
The staff had long ago stopped loving their charges and now they
hated the young bastards who pretended remorse for the dead men
and the holocaust of cattle. The psychologists said objectiveness was
essential, that the kids were the product of a pragmatism designed into
them, however unwittingly. But they were willing enough when finally
given permission to make an all out assault on the superhuman
minds. They went at them with drugs and sensory probes, trying to
discover what they had made, at the risk of destroying it.
I never found out much about that because I was recalled to barrack
duty.
So why mention it? Why, indeed, when this little carnival of cruelty is n o t a
matter of public record? The thin end of a secret? A sop to lure me on? Hist, I
am observed! Eleven interviews and at last a stirring of the enemy.
Dangerous? Undoubtedly, but I am like Childe Roland, whose road
vanished behind him. Nowhere to go but forward.
C onrad’s feeling for me? There is evidence, but it isn’t really my
story; I didn’t know much about it when Conrad showed how he
thought. You’d do better to ask Jilly, if you can find her. She has a
husband and kids somewhere in the city.
And thus, smoothly, am I directed to the next in line!
4
The farmer’s daughter
Hum an interest, Mister Newshound? Should I tell you to keep your
nose out of my private life? O r should I ask, how much it it worth?
And what makes you think it will be worth anything at all?
Because you are primed to make it worth. Educated, poised, disillusioned
and poor; grateful for a couple of hundred. A lady' who has, as they say, ‘seen
better days’. Heroine moves to window - thirtieth floor - holds drape aside to
gaze pensively over great, heartless city; pauses for me to name a sum. Her
husband looks uncomfortable at the blatant demand but doesn’t protest. Has
his orders from script director. All right, then, a small offer, just to play along.
I suppose you’ve seen Derek, because I never told anyone about
meeting Young Feller. It wouldn’t have helped the hunt. Also, Derek’s
wife had to be considered. I don’t know what my husband will think;
I’ve never told him about it.
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George Turner
He has been told what to think, Jilly. Out with it, girl!
Did Derek tell you that our homestead was burned out by that filthy
kid? We were lucky not to lose our lives. We lost the herd, which was
all Dad had, and it broke him. T hat’s why —
Nearly let out an unscripted bit then. Something like this: 'That's why I had
to marry, for survival, and why I’ve come to this musty husband in this musty
hole.'
I made a fool of myself over Derek. Masculinity, muscle and Special
Se
rvice glamour — and little snippets of information to make me
think myself privy to secrets. And dreams of romantic marriage.
Derek told me no lies; he just failed to mention a wife and a teenage
family.
We used to meet at The Willows. That was a picnic spot at a bend
in the creek at the bottom of our Long Paddock. There were half a
dozen big old trees, weeping almost to the ground; in the heart of them
you could not be seen from the further bank. It was one of the Long-
Drought years and the creek was almost dry, just a trickle, but the trees
were still sturdy and Derek would meet me there of an evening.
When the house was burned out and friends were putting us up, I
made excuses to get away because I needed desperately to see him. I
thought he’d surely propose now that I was literally homeless. So I
went there in the late afternoon, knowing he would come as soon as
he had handed over to the evening watch; there were still a couple of
hours of daylight.
I pushed the long, drooping fronds aside, and there was the boy! I
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
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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
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 24
