“No. I guess not.”
“A little sister will be a lot of fun for you. You’ll be bigger than she will be, and you’ll know a lot more, and you’ll be able to show her things. You’ll be the important one.”
No answer.
“Don’t you want a baby sister?”
“Not that one.”
“Why not?”
He turned completely away. They heard him mutter, “Old cuss boss!” Then he added distinctly, “and her cigars stink.”
The threesome was adjourned. Phyllis and Felix waited until the boy was asleep, and, presumably, with his telepathic ability out of gear. “It seems pretty evident,” he told her, “that he has identified Carvala in his mind with Justina.”
She agreed. “At least I’m relieved to know that it isn’t me he has a down on. Just the same, it’s serious. I think we had better call in a psychiatrist.”
Felix agreed. “But I’m going to talk to Claude about it, too.”
Claude refused to be upset by it. “After all,” he said, “it’s perfectly natural that blood relatives should dislike each other. That’s a prime datum of psychology. If you can’t condition him to put up with her, then you’ll have to rear them apart. A nuisance, but that’s all.”
“But how about this fixation of his?”
“I’m not a psychiatrist. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Children frequently get some funny notions. If you ignore them, they generally get over them.”
So the psychiatrist thought, too. But he was totally unable to shake Theobald’s conviction in the matter. He had made his point, he stuck to it, and he refused to argue.
It was a matter of prime significance, aside from Theobald’s fantastic delusion, that a telepathic person had been able to locate a person whom he had never seen and whose existence he had no reason to suspect. It was a fair-sized brick in the Great Research. Dutifully, Hamilton reported the affair to Carruthers.
Carruthers was intensely interested. He asked questions about it, took the matter home with him, and nursed it. The next day he called Felix to explain a plan he had conceived. “Mind you,” he said, “I’m not urging you to do this. I’m not even asking you. It’s your wife, and your baby, and your boy. But I think it’s a unique opportunity to advance the Research.”
Felix thought about it. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”
“How would you like,” he said to Phyllis, when they were alone that night, “to go to Buenos Aires to have Justina?”
“Buenos Aires? Why there?”
“Because there is the only telepath machine on Earth. And it can’t be moved out of the cold laboratory.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Da Capo
“I’VE GOT it again.” The receiver for the telepath made the announcement grimly. The gadget was still cantankerous; during the past few days it had worked beautifully part of the time-about twenty minutes in all! — and had refused to come to life the rest of the time. It seemed to have soaked up some of the contrariness of the subtle life-force it tapped. “What are you getting?”
“Feels like a dream. Water, long stretches of water. Shore line in the back with mountain peaks.” A recorder at his elbow took down everything he said, with the exact times. “Are you sure it’s the baby?”
“Sure as I was yesterday. Everybody is different over it. They taste different. I don’t know how else to express it. Hold on! Something else…a city, a damn big city, bigger than Buenos Aires.”
“Theobald,” said Mordan Claude gently, “can you still hear her?” Mordan had been brought because Felix conceded that Claude had a handier way with the child than Felix. The child could not hear the telepath receiver where they had spotted him, although Claude could cut in through an earphone. Phyllis, of course, was in another room, busy with her fundamental affairs…it made no difference to the gadget, nor to Theobald. Felix had a roving assignment, privileged to make a nervous nuisance out of himself to anyone.
The boy leaned back against Mordan’s thigh. “She’s not over the ocean any more,” he said. “She’s gone to Capital City.”
“Are you sure it’s Capital City?”
“Sure.” His voice was scornful. “I’ve been there, ain’t I? And there’s the tower.”