Go to Sleep, My Darling

                          By WINSTON K. MARKS

                     _If you're totally convinced
                       it's a man's world, don't
                    read this. But if in doubt...._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                        Infinity November 1958.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


At 46, Bertrand Baxter was a man's man, still struggling to adapt
himself to a smotheringly woman's world. His work, selling sporting
goods for Abernathy and Crisp Co., was his element. Not only was he an
ex-All American tackle, but his abiding love for sports had led him
into a business where he dealt almost exclusively with men.

Old Crisp had once told him, "Bert, if we had two more salesmen like
you we could fire the other twenty. You have a sixth sense dealing with
these coaches and school superintendents. They love you."

Yes, Bert Baxter could anticipate his male customer's requirements,
objections, moods and buying habits with an almost clairvoyant insight.
But give him a woman! He was licked before she opened his catalog.

Women found him attractive enough. His six-foot-four, square-jawed
athletic prowess had given him the pick of the class of '29, including
the statuesque Rolanda. But to marry a woman and to understand her
were different matters: the former ridiculously easy, the latter
bewilderingly impossible.

The easy familiarity he enjoyed with men of the slightest acquaintance
was something he could never establish in his own home with his own
wife and his own daughters. Fate, as if to further confound him, had
presented Bertrand with four daughters.

Of all these females, Rolanda, Aileen, Grace, Norma and Annie, only
two month-old Annie was currently making sense to Bert Baxter. That
was because she was a baby, and not yet a female in the baffling sense
of the word. His other three daughters had had their turns, but as
they emerged from infanthood into childhood they became unmistakable
girl-children almost with their first mama-papa lisps, and thereby
removed themselves from Baxter's realm of fathomable human beings.

He lay sleepless one November night beside the gently snoring Rolanda,
debating the wisdom of having induced her to try once more to provide
him with a son. Although Rolanda was forty at the time, Annie had
arrived without undue trouble, fitted immediately into the Baxter
feminine regime and established herself in Bert's heart quite solidly,
if only temporarily.

The misgivings that beset him were vague ones. Annie was the apple
of his eye, but in a few short months she would add to the flooding
tide of womanhood that swirled through his house, squealing, giggling,
moping, hair-curling, nylon-rinsing, plucking, powdering, painting,
primping, ironing, sweater-trading, lipstick-snitching and man-baiting.

Too soon--much too soon--dear, understandable little Annie would move
off in her own miasma of perfume and verbal nonsense, leaving Bertrand
once again a lonely man in his crowded home.

The illuminated dial said precisely two o'clock when a tiny whimper
seeped through the adjacent wall from the nursery. Baxter was on the
verge of slipping into a doze, but it brought his eyes open.

The two o'clock feeding!

He loved Annie dearly, but it was high time she was omitting the late
feeding. It meant rousing Rolanda, who never heard the call. It meant
lights and commotion, short tempers, bottle-banging in the kitchen. It
meant disturbing the other girls, which occasioned a slipper-shuffling
parade to the bathroom with attendant flushing, tap-turning,
glass-rattling and ostentatious whispering that turned the hall into a
rustling snake-pit.

_Don't wake daddy! He has to get up early._

Indeed daddy had to get up early if he hoped to enjoy his shower in
peace in the stocking-strewn bathroom.

"Go to sleep, Annie," Baxter said in the deep recesses of his mind. "Go
to sleep, my darling," he urged gently. "Please don't start the circus!
Let me rest. Go to sleep, my darling."

Annie's whimper faded. Stopped.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the hazy realm between waking and slumber, it didn't seem remarkable
to Baxter. Not until he was stuffing his briefcase the following
morning did he recall that Annie had at last skipped her late feeding.
The memory of his urgent, silent pleading with her came back, and he
smiled to himself. If it were only that easy, he thought.

He had a strenuous day driving out to a rural school district and
rounding up five members of the athletic board to complete a nice
contract for basketball equipment. He dribbled an Abernathy & Crisp
basketball around the gym twelve times for the coach, lugged four
sample cases of uniforms up a flight of stairs, and made uncounted
round trips to his distantly-parked station wagon for afterthought
items to satisfy inquiries.

But he had energy enough to bowl all evening at the athletic club, of
which he was a board director. When he arrived home at ten o'clock, a
"bargain" in fireplace wood which Rolanda had purchased from a late
peddler was heaped across the short driveway and had to be tossed into
the basement before he could garage the car.

He had learned not to question Rolanda's bargains, regardless of the
time of day or night they occurred. She welcomed such criticisms as
occasions to strike for an increase in the household allowance. "Of
course, I wouldn't have to take advantage of these penny-savers that
you say cause more trouble than they're worth--if we could afford
another five dollars a week...."

So he changed clothes, threw in the wood, showered and sank gratefully
into bed. Rolanda was still wiping on cold cream. He asked, "Would you
please open the window before you jump in?"

"But it's cold out, dear."

"It's barely November," he pointed out. "We had that all out last year.
Closed windows only during blizzards and high winds."

"I know, dear, but summer's just over, and our blood's still thin.
Besides, we put on the electric blankets today."

Since, theoretically, expensive electric blankets were supposed to
_add_ to one's security against chilling, the argument detracted not
a whit from Baxter's convictions, but he was too tired to pursue the
annual debate about chilling-versus-fresh air requirements.

He inhaled the dense mist of aromatic, warm, humid boudoir essences
and fell into exhausted slumber. His dream was a recurrent one
wherein he wandered barefoot through an echoing chamber. He was a
Lilliputian, searching the interior of Rolanda's skull, a great, empty,
reverberating dome. He had no notion for what he was searching, but
all he found were the roots of her yellow hair sticking down through
the pate.

The edge of his fatigue had just nicely worn off to that treacherous
point, where to be awakened would result in hours of wakeful tossing,
when the whimper came. It came again, and Baxter swam up from the
depths until he was half awake.

"Sleep, baby!" he urged. "Close your eyes and go to sleep, my darling."
His lips didn't move, and he was only dreamily aware of the foolish
hope that his good luck of last night might be repeated.

It worked. Annie quieted, went back to sleep and stayed asleep until
morning.

       *       *       *       *       *

A week later Rolanda remarked about it at the breakfast table. It did,
indeed, seem that Annie had reformed her nocturnal habits; but Baxter
knew better. Each night, now, at the first whimper he sent his silent,
mental message winging through the plaster, lath and pink wallpaper to
the pink baby under the pink blanket in the pink crib. Annie was still
waking at two a.m. each night, but she was still complying with his
soothing thought-appeals.

That night, the whimper found him sleepless again. Starkly awake,
with eyes wide open, it seemed ridiculous to repeat such a foolish,
wishful-thinking process, and he refrained from doing so. Telepathy was
nonsense!

The whimper grew in volume, welled up into a full-throated wail that
prickled the short hairs of his neck. "Oh, no! Annie, for heaven's
sake!"

Without thinking further on it he slipped into his silent pleading. "Go
to sleep, baby. Go to sleep, my darling."

Annie had too much momentum to capitulate easily. He pleaded and
cajoled, and finally he mentally hummed three stanzas of "Rock-a-Bye
Baby."

The wail trembled and fell off into a few reluctant sobs. Annie was
comforted, reassured. Annie slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

For all his preoccupation with sports and other manly extroversions,
Bertrand Baxter was not unimaginative. His stunning victory on this
seventh night was too dramatic to ignore. He said not a word about it
to Rolanda, but the following night he deliberately stayed wide awake
until Annie sounded off.

Instead of immediately flooding his infant daughter with the warm
reassurance and pleading requests that she sleep, Baxter let his
mind "feel" of the situation. He spoke softly to her in his
unmouthed mind-talk, and for the first time he became aware of a
tiny but positive mental response. There was a faint fringe of
discomfort-thoughts--a weak hunger pang, a slight thirst, a clammy
diaper. But mostly there was the cheerless darkness and a heavy feeling
of aloneness, a love-want, an outreaching for assurance.

As his thoughts went out he could sense that Annie _did_ receive
them and take comfort from them--and the little physical hungers and
discomforts faded from her mind.

She felt reassured now, loved, petted, cosy and warm in the velvety
gloom, in the restful quiet.

He sensed the peace that settled through her, and the same peace
flooded through him, a rare sensation of security, understanding and
blind trust.

Annie slept. Baxter slept.

       *       *       *       *       *

And then it was Saturday morning. Baxter stayed abed, yielding the
bathroom to his three teen-age daughters. Annie was still asleep, too,
so Rolanda was stretching leisurely beside him like a long, pink cat.
Noticing the time, she raised to an elbow and viewed him with some
concern. "No golf this morning? Aren't you well, Bert?"

Had he plunged out of bed to forage for his golf shoes as usual, she
would have grumbled about how it must be Saturday, and she wished that
_she_ had a whole morning off each week to _herself_.

He replied slowly, "Later, maybe. Want to rest a little bit. Don't
stare! I feel fine. Just thinking a little."

She shrugged, put on her robe and entered the bathroom competition.

Baxter lay waiting, eyes closed, concentrating. Then it came. The
sensation of gentle awakening. Light--at first just a diffused pink
light, then outlines forming: the ceiling fixture, the yellow-billed
ducks on the pale pink wallpaper, the round bars of the crib. The
sensation of movement, stretching, a glorious feeling of well-being.

Annie was awake.

Then in rapid succession, the sensation of wet diaper, cramped toe,
hunger pang, _hunger pang_!

Annie yelled.

The sound came through firmly and demandingly, interrupting Baxter's
concentration and breaking the remarkable rapport, but he had proved to
himself beyond all doubt what he had been dubiously challenging: _He
had established a clear, telepathic entry into his daughter's mind_.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now he was so excited that he forgot himself and tried to explain the
whole thing to Rolanda. She seemed to listen with half an ear as she
assembled breakfast. She didn't understand, or she misunderstood, or
she understood but disapproved--Baxter wasn't at all certain which it
was. When he finished she simply paused in her oatmeal dishing, pulled
her housecoat tightly about her and said, "Nonsense! You went back to
sleep after I got up. You're dreaming these things. It is high time
that Annie began skipping her night feeding."

But her eyes were narrowed cat-slits, and Baxter felt a positive
warning in them. He felt that since creation, probably no man had
actually penetrated a woman's brain to probe the willy-nilly logic
that functioned there:--functioned well, for somehow things got done,
but functioned in such a topsy-turvy manner as to drive a serious male
insane if he pondered it too long.

He retreated to the morning paper and said no more about it. Before he
left for the golf club he had another remarkable experience. He stepped
into the nursery and stared down at the adorable little pink-cheeked
Annie. He closed his eyes and sought her mind--_and saw himself
standing above the crib--through her eyes_! It was clear as a TV
image. In fact he noted that he needed a shave and looked quite strange
with his eyes closed.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the days that followed Baxter became addicted to slipping into
Annie's innocent little mind at almost any hour of her waking. At the
office. In a customer's waiting room. Even out on the golf course while
waiting for a slow foursome to tee off ahead. Distance was no obstacle
to the telepathic rapport.

And he began to make fabulous plans. As Annie grew he would follow her
mental progress, investigating every aspect of her thought processes to
learn the key to womankind's inexplicable mind. Through her eyes and
other senses he would _experience_ the woman's world as it impinged
upon her, and one day he would fathom the deepest, eternal secrets of
all womanhood.

Whether Rolanda divined his intentions Baxter never knew, but when
Annie was three months old she suddenly began resisting her father's
mental intrusion.

He first noticed it one evening right after Annie had been tucked in
for the night. Baxter was pretending to doze in his leather chair in
the den, but actually he had been keeping mental watch until Rolanda
cleared out of the nursery--for some reason he feared communing with
Annie while his wife was in the room.

Rolanda had come out, down the hall, stopped in the open door of his
den, and he had felt her gaze upon him for a long minute.

When she passed on without comment, Baxter sought to enter Annie's mind
and enjoy her nightly snugged-down feeling of contentment. He probed
gently, and to his surprise he met a barrier, an impalpable resistance,
a shutting-out that he had never encountered. He pressed more firmly.
Dim perceptions began to come through to him, but they were dominated
by displeasure emotion.

Annie cried out.

Baxter withdrew instantly, feeling somewhat guilty. Then he tried again.

Annie screamed.

Rolanda came down the hall, paused at his door and said, "What do you
suppose is the matter with her tonight? She always drops off."

Without waiting for an answer, she passed down the hall to the nursery
and comforted Annie to sleep. Baxter tried no more that night.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the same each time he tried thereafter. Abruptly, Annie had
become irritable, intolerant of his probing. How she could understand
what was happening mystified Baxter, but he was determined to retain
contact. He kept pushing, gently but firmly, and although it brought on
some furious yells, he succeeded in making at least one daily survey of
his infant daughter's mind.

For a week Rolanda became increasingly hostile for no apparent reason.
Baxter felt that the tension that grew between them was in some
way connected with Annie, but his wife never spoke of it. Never a
particularly demonstrative woman, she became even colder, and often he
caught her regarding him with an enigmatical look of suspicion.

As a long-sufferer to her moods, Baxter had no fear that an open break
might develop. His life was insured for $75,000, and Rolanda was much
too hard-headed to consider divorcing such a solid "producer" of bread
and luxuries as she and her female brood had learned to enjoy.

Meanwhile, Annie's mind was becoming an even more fascinating field for
exploration. In spite of her resistance, Baxter's shallow penetration
revealed the amazing network of learning that daily increased her web
of knowledge, experience and stimulus-response conditioning. Often
Baxter pondered what a psychologist would give for such an opportunity
as this.

He became so bemused with his objective study that, the night Annie
withdrew her barriers, Baxter fell into her mind like a lion into a
game-hunter's animal pit.

       *       *       *       *       *

He was, again, in his leather chair. Rolanda had just put Annie to bed
and passed his open door. He probed for Annie's mind and leaned the
heavy weight of his own strong mind on the expected barrier. It was
gone!

He sank deeply into his daughter's brain and caught his breath. He had
forgotten what it was like, this total absorption with her physical and
emotional sensations.

Annie was feeling good. Her stomach was full, she was warm, dry and
pleasantly tired from her evening romp. She stretched and yawned, and a
feeling of euphoria swept over Baxter.

Never had he completed such a transfer. He could feel every little
primitive pleasure sensation that rippled through Annie's healthy,
growing body. Conversely, two dozen trivial but annoying twinges,
aches, pains and bodily pressures that slowly accumulate with the years
vanished from his 46-year-old body.

The abscessed tooth that he should have had pulled a month ago quit
hurting. The ache from the slightly pulled muscle in his back faded
away. The pressure from the incipient gastric ulcer in his stomach
eased off and disappeared. All the tensions and minor infirmities that
had slipped up on him, almost unnoticed with middle age, vanished;
and Baxter knew once again the long-forgotten, corporeal ecstasy of a
young, human animal in the rapid-growth stages.

       *       *       *       *       *

He awoke to see the fuzzy image of Rolanda over him. It was morning.
Her face was faintly troubled, but she smiled with a rare warmth when
he cooed at her. She caught him up in her arms, murmuring endearing
sounds. Snuggled to her breast, he felt the satisfaction of a great
subconscious yearning as the scented woman-smell pervaded his nostrils
and her strong, warm arms cuddled him tightly.

There was the unpleasant business of a diaper change, during which he
became sharply aware of hunger. He yelled lustily for food, and soon
he was sucking hungrily on a deliciously flexible rubber nipple that
yielded an ambrosia of warm sweetness.

A jumble of clear, high voices chirped familiarly in his ears, but
he paid no attention to the words as such. His bath was delightful,
although he sneezed violently at the talcum dust afterward. Now the
voices were silent except Rolanda's occasional soft words to him. Again
he enjoyed his liquid meal and slipped into delicious slumber with the
shades drawn.

       *       *       *       *       *

Voices awakened him. A man's voice mingled with his wife's.

"In here, doctor. We managed to carry him to bed, and he hasn't
awakened yet."

Baxter heard the words with mild interest but no comprehension.
The man's voice came through the wall of the nursery from the next
bedroom, a low rumble of pleasant sound. "No sign of physical
impairment. Resembles a catatonic trance. Strange. Heartbeat is rapid,
light--respiration, too. Like a baby's. We'd better take him down to
the hospital."

"Is it that serious?"

"Will be if he continues unconscious. He'll starve."

"I'll call the ambulance."

       *       *       *       *       *

Baxter fell asleep again. The chirping voices returned that afternoon,
but there was a subdued air about them. For a few days the routine
continued: eating, sleeping, eating, bathing, sleeping, eating--a
wonderous, kaleidoscopic fairyland of enjoyable sensations.

The subdued air disappeared, and the voices chirped loudly and happily
around him again. All was pleasant, comfortable, secure.

Then one morning his heart beat heavily, awakening him from his nap.
His eyelids tore open to a weird sight. Several strange men and woman
stood around him. They were dressed in white, and he was in a hospital
bed. As he traced a rubber tube from its stand-hung bottle down to
his arm, a rush of unpleasant sensations, twinges, pains, stiffnesses
swarmed back into him.

Reluctantly he heard the doctor speak and he tried to pay no attention.
"The adrenalin did it. He's coming around, I think. No, dammit, he's
closing his eyes again. Doesn't seem interested. I thought for a
minute...."

Baxter clenched his eyes tightly and tried to ignore the burning
emptiness of his emaciated stomach, the harsh roughness of the hospital
sheets against his weak, bed-sore calves. The drug was fire in his
veins, and his heart threatened to jump out of his breast.

_Annie, where are you?_

A soft, nonverbal little response touched his wracked brain, inviting
him to return. He concentrated, blocking out the muttering voices
around him....

"--can't keep a man his size alive indefinitely with
intravenous--better phone Mrs. Baxter--call a priest, too."

       *       *       *       *       *

He made it. He was back in the crib. Rolanda was pulling up the nursery
shades terminating his nap. The phone was ringing.

"Be right back, sweetheart," Rolanda said. "Mother has to answer the
phone."

Her voice came only faintly from the hallway in dull monosyllables.
Then she was back, scooping him up in her arms. She sat in a rocker and
looked down at him thoughtfully, a serious frown across her wide, white
brow. "You poor little darling. You'll never know your daddy."

For an instant Baxter's consciousness flickered back and forth across
miles of intervening space. A cold panic clutched his heart. He heard
a sharp sob escape from Annie's lips, then Rolanda was rocking him and
comforting him.

"Don't you worry, sweetheart. It's all right. We'll get along. Daddy's
insured. And there's his service pension. We'll get along just _fine_."

An intuitive flash of horror chilled Baxter. He struggled to escape to
his own brain, his own dying body, but now the barrier was up again,
not impalpable but tough and impenetrable.

The more he struggled the weaker he became. Sensations from the nursery
began to fade. The light grew dimmer, and Rolanda's face became hazy.
Frantically, he tried to withdraw from Annie's mind, but he was
mousetrapped!

Was this Annie's doing? Was this the vengeance she took against her own
father for his invasion of her privacy?

Or was it his own mind's refusal to face life again through the network
of pain and misery of his adult identity? Infantile regression, the
doctor had called it--but the doctor didn't know about Annie.

He could still feel the gentle rocking motion and his wife's arms
holding him tenderly in the warm blankets.

"We'll get along just fine, honey," she was saying. "When we get the
insurance money we'll have a larger house and a new car."

_Rolanda! For God's sake, make Annie let me go!_

"And you'll have a pretty room all to yourself when you are older.
And--and there's no reason why you can't sleep in my room tonight.
Would you like that, Annie?"

Now the light was dimming fast, but Baxter sensed the glow of pleasure
in Annie's tiny body and heard her soft cooing.

"Why, Annie," Rolanda's words came from a great distance, "you're
smiling! As if you understood every word! Why, you little dickens!"

Annie stiffened suddenly, then she sighed and gurgled happily--as
though she had just gotten something off her mind.