Astounding Science Fiction, British Edition — page 44: what you’re looking at

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

42 ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION environment, shadows of the prison- house are inevitably, slowly but in- exorably closed in by all the problems of living which he fails to solve com- pletely without even realizing it. But not the Baldies. There are always friends to help, there are always minds to lean upon in crises and uncertain- ties. There is constant check and balance, so that no Baldy suffers from those inward quandaries, those only partly recognized clouds of confusion and bewilderment which fog the happi- ness of every other human being. In the telepathic mind there are compara- tively few unswept chambers cluttered with old doubts and fears. It makes for a clarity of the personality which no nontelepath quite achieves. A telepath may become psychotic, of course, but only when subjected to such stresses, over a long period of time, as a nontelepath could endure only briefly without breaking. (The paranoid telepaths were in a different class ; heredity was an important factor there.) So marriage between Baldy and non- telepath is, at best, marriage between an alert, receptive, fully aware being and one murky and confused, handi- capped in communication and always, on some level, latently resentful. But by now almost every marriage- able nontelepath in the caverns had been painstakingly courted by and married to a Baldy. They were at the same time, of course, inevitably mar- ried to an espionage agent, a willing but not always accepted psycho- analyst, and, most importantly, to the potential parent of other Baldies. The gene is dominant, which means that the children were almost invari- ably telepathic. Only when the Baldy spouse possessed one recessive non- telepathic gene as well as one dominant telepathic gene could the child be born a nontelepath. That was what had happened to Lucy and Jeff Cody— No human was ever to leave the caves again. No Baldy was to know of the captivity who did not wear the Mute helmet, since if the world ever learned of this captivity, the long- awaited pogrom would touch off auto- matically. No child of human parents would ever leave, unless it left as an infant in arms, too young to remember or tell the story. But a telepath child was a recruit at birth to the ranks of ‘the captors. The hope had been that in a generation or two the captives could automatically be blended with the Baldies or taken out of the caves at infancy, so that the colony would once more revert to its original state of a population composed only of telepaths. That had been the original plan, but growing pressures had already made it obsolete. Lucy wiped her mouth on the back of a lightly tanned hand and held out the emptied glass to Cody. She waited a moment while the whiskey burned its way down and spread in a slow, hot coating over the walls of her stomach. “Take a little,” she said. “It helps.” Cody didn’t want any, but he tilted a short half-inch into the glass and drank obediently. After a time Lucy gave a short sigh and sat up cross- legged on the bed, shaking the hair back from her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Irrational.” She laid her hand palm up on the bedspread and Cody closed his own hand over it, smiling unhappily at her. “T’ve got an appointment outside,” he said. “I'll have to leave in a few minutes, Lucy.” Her look shot wild and unguarded toward the crib in the corner. Her thought, at once blurred and clarified by the release of alcohol, unfurled like a flag. Cody almost winced at the connicloooks.c© nA