Quicksand (20 page)

 

 

The door of his office trembled to a ferocious bang, and one of the deputy
porters entered, swinging a large cardboard package by its string.

 

 

"Morning, Doc. Parcel just arrived for you!"

 

 

A glance at the name of the dispatching firm showed that it was what he
had been expecting: a kit of standard intelligence tests including most
of those described in the article Tumbelow had loaned him.

 

 

He opened it up. Surrounded by a welter of torn tissue paper, he studied
the instructions and found them clear and concise. He was already familiar
with many of the tests from the receiving end, and although he hadn't
administered any since he finished training he anticipated no problems.

 

 

-- Hell of a well-matched battery, this! Correlative tables, weighting
factors, lists of common anomalous deviations . . . Yes, we can go places
with this lot. When?

 

 

He frowned over his day's timetable.

 

 

-- Suppose I start at one-thirty. This lot, plus a man-drawing test, will
take about an hour; that means postponing the two o'clock appointment
to half past, and then . . .

 

 

He made some rapid changes to the schedule, notified the appropriate
departments, and asked the stores to send him up a stopwatch to time the
tests with. Then he arranged for Urchin to be brought to his office at
one-thirty sharp.

 

 

After gulping down his lunch, he roped in Nurse Davis, willingly enough,
to time the tests for him. She was quick on the uptake, and he completed
his briefing of her comfortably ahead of time.

 

 

Offering her a cigarette -- he wanted one himself because his nerves
were unaccountably jangling -- he asked her on impulse, "Nurse, this
girl Urchin has been here for some time now. What do you make of her?"

 

 

Nurse Davis's dimples deepened enormously. "That's a queer one, Doctor.
But queer in the wrong way."

 

 

"How do you mean?"

 

 

"The peculiar things she does are kind of consistent, get me?"

 

 

Paul hesitated. "Do you think she's actually insane?"

 

 

"That's a funny kind of question!"

 

 

"So give me a funny answer," Paul snapped.

 

 

"I don't have any answers, Doctor. But . . . All right, I'll go out on
a limb. She strikes me as acting foreign. Not crazy -- foreign."

 

 

A tap on the door, and Nurse Foden delivered Urchin at the very moment
the clock above chimed and clinked the half-hour.

 

 

Paul studied the mysterious girl as she settled in a chair facing him
across the table he had pulled out to use for the tests, warily as ever.

 

 

-- Wary, yes. But not terrified any more. Must have made up her mind
she isn't going to be tortured. . . . So Nurse Davis thinks she "acts
foreign." I wish to God I knew what kind of foreign!

 

 

He had finally received a next-to-definite opinion from the philologists
he had consulted about her language. They said they could find nobody who
recognised it; the spoken form bore some relationship to the Finno-Ugrian
language family, as the written form did to runic, but none of them would
commit himself by giving it a name. In short, they had been as helpful
as Dr Jewell when, in his capacity as the hospital's medical consultant,
he made some vague remark about the epicanthic fold being a feature of
Mongoloid idiocy.

 

 

-- Mongoloids tend to be sickly and die young. This girl's very much alive,
and I don't have to test her IQ to tell that she isn't an idiot.

 

 

"Good afternoon, Paul," she said with elaborately precise diction. The
exaggerated vowel-deformations that had marked her first attempts to
pronounce English had given way to an almost accentless mirror of those
around her.

 

 

"Good afternoon," he returned.

 

 

"What we do today?" A thrusting forward of her tongue between her lips,
as though stoppering the escape route of. the words, and a correction.
"Sorry. What
will
we do today?"

 

 

-- Apparently it's not enough for her to get her meaning across.
She insists on doing it idiomatically.

 

 

"Very good," he approved. But it was bound to be a waste of time giving
a verbal description of what he planned. She would catch on through
simple example. Nonetheless he spoke as he set out and demonstrated
the first test: a form-board designed for bright primary children and
retarded adolescents.

 

 

"When I say 'start' you put
these
in the holes."

 

 

She went through the easy ones so quickly it wasn't worth worrying
about the timing. He moved ahead to the more complex versions, based on
the combination of tangram-like pieces of multicoloured card to match
assorted geometrical figures -- squares, stars and crosses. Silent at
the side of the room, Nurse Davis noted the times on a printed form
which had been included in the package.

 

 

He had been expecting Urchin to show the first signs of difficulty when
it came to the colour-reversal sequence, involving the reconstruction
of previously accomplished figures with the contrasting colours exchanged.
But she caught on to the idea so quickly that Nurse Davis almost missed
clicking the stopwatch.

 

 

-- Lord! I don't have to check the instructions to know that she's over
the limits of measurement on
all
those!

 

 

He turned to withdraw the next test from the box: a Passalong test,
sophisticated cousin of a well-known children's puzzle, in which the
order of sliding squares had to be reversed within a time limit. When
he glanced back he found that Urchin had taken several of the scraps of
card belonging to the previous tests and grouped them, tangram-fasbion,
into an amusing sketch of a man and a woman standing together.

 

 

Seeing he was ready to proceed, she swept them aside with a chuckle and
leaned forward to examine the Passalong. When he thought he had made it
clear what was wanted, he told her to start.

 

 

She stared at it without making a move, long enough for him to grow
worried lest he had failed to convey the purpose of it. Just as he was
about to call it off and try a fresh run, she shot out her hand and
completed the task with swift, economical motions. As far as he could
tell, she had figured out the optimum series of moves and then carried
them out with no false starts.

 

 

-- She's going to rate over 150. Could be a lot higher.

 

 

Next he tried a sequence-touching test: tapping coloured cards in the
same order as the examiner had done. At first there were only four, but
more were added. When he had exhausted the seven supplied with the kit,
Paul included on impulse two more belonging to another test. Urchin
went through the entire nine with matter-of-fact briskness and not a
single error.

 

 

-- I'm not even within shouting distance of her abilities!

 

 

Sighing, he turned to the last tests he had on hand. If none of these
presented her any difficulty, he'd have to send for a battery of advanced
adult tests and sort out the ones least dependent on the use of words.

 

 

The concluding group consisted of pattern recognitions: simple matching
to begin with, then tests for awareness of topological identity, including
inversions, mirror-images and deformations, then some really tough ones --
both odd-man-out and group-completion involving points of resemblance so
subtle Paul felt himself baffled by them, and finally a series dependent
on analogies rather than actual identity.

 

 

Here at long last there were a couple which she didn't get right, but
they were in the hardest section of all, and she did the correct thing
by skipping them when they failed to strike her at once, so that she
completed the remainder within the time limit.

 

 

-- She's enjoying this. Look how her eyes are sparkling.

 

 

Well . . . That left one simple test, too subjective for his own taste
but vouched for by experts as adequately correlated with g. He gave her
a large sheet of white paper and a pencil, established that she knew
what the word "draw", meant, and told her to draw a man.

 

 

Rising, he went over to the window and beckoned Nurse Davis to show him
her timings. He ran down them, comparing each with the highest score in
the tables supplied, and eventually shook his head.

 

 

"Something wrong, Doctor?" the nurse ventured.

 

 

"I wish there was!" Paul blurted. "Then I'd feel happier about her being
in Chent!"

 

 

"She's done very well, hasn't she?"

 

 

Paul gave a sour grin. "She's over the limit on almost all these tests,
which means she'd place about a hundred and eighty on the scale. And
this is meaningless. I remember one of my professors saying that IQ
tests were defensible up to about a hundred and twenty, debatable up
to a hundred and fifty, and laughable anywhere above that because the
subject is probably brighter than the man who invented the test. Time
must be just about up, hm?"

 

 

Nurse Davis turned back towards Urchin and looked over her shoulder. After
a second she began to giggle.

 

 

"You ought to be flattered, Doctor! It's good enough to be framed!"

 

 

Paul stared at what Urchin had done. Nurse Davis was right. He was
looking at one of the most masterly pencil portraits he had ever seen,
and the subject was himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*25*

 

 

A hawthorn hedge visible from the window of the staff sitting-room had
put on white blossom as thick as a snowstorm. Gazing at it, Paul reviewed
the progress he had made in dealing with his twin problems: Urchin, and
Iris. Having obtained concrete proof of Urchin's intelligence, he had
been left on the horns of a dilemma. Her behaviour continued apparently
rational, with no further outbreaks like the attack on the nurse at
Blickham General -- nothing, in fact, but a slight disagreement with a
newly arrived nurse who tried to force her to eat a stew with meat in
it against Paul's instructions that she should be allowed a vegetarian
diet. This suggested that Nurse Davis's description of her as "foreign"
was the correct one.

 

 

On the other hand, she was becoming so fluent in English that Paul was
inclined to wonder whether she was really learning it for the first
time. There were two alternatives: she might be relearning something
temporarily lost through hysterical amnesia, or she might all along have
been pretending not to understand. The last possibility was the least
likely. Shoemaker had been dogmatic about the difficulty of constructing
an imaginary language which would baffle a trained philologist. However,
she rated as a genius in every test he had been able to apply; perhaps
someone of such outstanding intellect could devise and stick to an
invented language.

 

 

A showdown with Iris could not be put off much longer. Faced with its
inevitability, Paul had begun to feel less and less certain of persuading
her to accept the pregnancy. He needed some sort of reassurance of
his own abilities, and sought it in an early resolution of the mystery
of Urchin. She was now in command of a vocabulary which ought to have
let her answer inquiries about her origins, even if only in the most
general terms. He had worked up gradually to some direct questions,
growing more and more irritated with her evasions, and today he was
virtually certain she had lied to him when she claimed not to know the
right words to phrase her answers.

 

 

On the verge of accusing her, he had suddenly recovered his professional
control and realised that if she was lying to him this must be due to a
disturbance of the personality. He would be very ashamed of himself if he
lost his temper with a patient for something that the patient couldn't
help. Which of the staff at Chent should know better than Paul Fidler,
ex-madman, what that helplessness was like?

 

 

Having dismissed her, he found himself in the grip of another of his
visions of disaster narrowly avoided: this time, a fantasy in which Urchin
lost her trust in him because he had shouted at her, refused further
co-operation and ultimately retreated into such apathy that there was no
hope of her ever leaving Chent. It upset him so much that he abandoned
his work and came to collect his tea and biscuits ahead of time.

 

 

There was no urgency about Urchin's case. He sensed that. A point might
be reached at which she felt sufficiently confident of her ability to
express her meaning and began to talk freely, but no one -- probably not
even she herself -- could forecast when it would arrive. By contrast,
the embryo in Iris's womb was growing inexorably in accordance with
biological laws, and he could name to the week, if not to the day,
the very latest moment when he would have to face the issue.

 

 

Knowing that, he still could not concentrate on preparing for it. His mind
remained dominated by Urchin, as he saw her during his daily rounds of
the hospital. Sister Wells had given her a portfolio with a broken handle
from the cupboard where the unclaimed effects of deceased patients were
stored; she had mended it neatly with a braided cord, and now carried it
everywhere. It contained the objects she had accumulated to help her find
her bearings: notepad and pencil, a child's picture dictionary, a cheap
atlas in limp covers, a drawing-book which he had bought for her when,
on impulse, he adopted Nurse Davis's suggestion and took the portrait
she had made of him into Blickham to have it framed. It now hung on
the wall of his office; when she'd seen it there for the first time,
Urchin had hugged him in delight at the compliment.