Argosy, September 1955 — page 141: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE CHRYSALIDS 139 very carefully, particularly when people were having silly argu- ments that we could have settled at once; or wanted to do things one way when we knew there was a much better way. So I understood well what Rosalind meant when she said it might be dangerous to tell Petra. We decided to wait a bit, and see how things went. We had to keep on waiting for nearly a year. By that time, Rosalind and I were wondering how we could get married. It wasn’t going to be easy. The feud between our families had been established for years. My father and _half- Uncle Angus both kept hawk-like eyes upon each other’s land for the least Deviation or Offence, and even went to the length of rewarding informers who brought news of irregularities in the other’s territory. Rosalind’s mother had already attempted match- making for her; and my mother had put one or two suitable girls in my way. Neither had any idea about us, for we only seldom and accidentally met. Both of us knew, and had known for some time that when we married, it would have to be to one of “us.” ‘To have to live intimately with someone who had no thought-shapes would be intolerable: we'd still be closer to one another than to the people we had married, and from them we should be separated by some- thing as wide as a different language, and more solid than a wall. Worst of all, we’d never be able to have any confidence: it would mean a lifetime of guarding against slips, and we knew already that some slips were inevitable. Besides, when two people have known one another’s thought-shapes for as long as Rosalind and I had, they grow to need one another very much. I don’t see how “ normal ’”’ people who can never share their thoughts can understand how it is with us: we are so much more a part of one another. We don’t flounder among the shortcomings of words; we don’t hide or pretend, nor do we misunderstand one another. What, then, could there be for any of us tied closely to a half-dumb ‘ normal ’”’ who can never at best make more than a clever guess at another’s feelings and thoughts? Nothing but misery and frustration—with, sooner or later, the fatal slip or sum of slips... It was an impasse. We should have had to make our own way out if the course had not been thrust upon us. One fine May afternoon Petra went off, riding the pony. She did two things that she knew to be forbidden. First, although she was by herself, she went off our own land: secondly, she went into the woods. As a rule, the woods about Waknuk are fairly safe, but it never does to count on that. Creatures can work their way down the necks of forest which thrust out of the Fringes almost clear across the Wild Country in places, and then slink across from one patch of woodland to another. Big creatures seldom get as far as Waknuk; nevertheless, it is unwise to go into the woods without a weapon of some kind. ComiGyooksrcom