Brave New Worlds

when she didn't find it, she dumped the contents on the floor to search more carefully. The notebook was not there.
    "Lisa, when did you have it last?"
    "I don't know. A few days ago. I don't remember. "
    "When Madam Trudeau talked to you the last time, did you have it then?"
    "No. I couldn't find it. She said if I didn't have it the next time I was called for an interview, she'd whip me. But I can't find it!" She broke into tears and threw herself down on her small heap of belongings. She beat her fists on them and sobbed. "She's going to whip me and I can't find it. I can't. It's gone. "
    Carla stared at her. She shook her head. "Lisa, stop that crying. You couldn't have lost it. Where? there's no place to lose it. You didn't take it from your cubicle, did you?"
    The girl sobbed louder. "No. No. No. I don't know where it is. "
    Carla knelt by her and pulled the child up from the floor to a squatting position. "Lisa, what did you put in the notebook? Did you play with it?"
    Lisa turned chalky white and her eyes became very large, then she closed them, no longer weeping.
    "So you used it for other things? Is that it? What sort of things?"
    Lisa shook her head. "I don't know. Just things. "
    "All of it? the whole notebook?"
    "I couldn't help it. I didn't know what to write down. Madam Westfall said too much. I couldn't write it all. She wanted to touch me and I was afraid of her and I hid under the chair and she kept calling me, ‘Child, come here, don't hide, I'm not one of them. Go to the cave and take it with you. ' And she kept reaching for me with her hands. I. . . They were like chicken claws. She would have ripped me apart with them. She hated me. She said she hated me. She said I should have been killed with the others, why wasn't I killed with the others. "
    Carla, her hands hard on the child's shoulders, turned away from the fear and despair she saw on the girl's face.
    Ruthie pushed past her and hugged the child. "Hush, hush, Lisa. Don't cry now. Hush. There, there. "
    Carla stood up and backed away. "Lisa, what sort of things did you put in the notebook?"
    "Just things that I like. Snowflakes and flowers and designs. "
    "All right. Pick up your belongings and sit down. We must be nearly there. It seems like the tube is stopping. "
    Again they were shown from a closed compartment to a closed limousine and whisked over countryside that remained invisible to them. There was a drizzly rain falling when they stopped and got out of the car.
    The Westfall house was a three-storied, pseudo-Victorian wooden building, with balconies and cupolas, and many chimneys. There was scaffolding about it, and one of the three porches had been torn away and was being replaced as restoration of the house, turning it into a national monument, progressed. The girls accompanied the casket to a gloomy, large room where the air was chilly and damp, and scant lighting cast deep shadows. After the casket had been positioned on the dais which also had accompanied it, the girls followed Madam Trudeau through narrow corridors, up narrow steps, to the third floor where two large rooms had been prepared for them, each containing seven cots.
    Madam Trudeau showed them the bathroom that would serve their needs, told them goodnight, and motioned Carla to follow her. They descended the stairs to a second-floor room that had black, massive furniture: a desk, two straight chairs, a bureau with a wavery mirror over it, and a large canopied bed.
    Madam Trudeau paced the black floor silently for several minutes without speaking, then she swung around and said, "Carla, I heard every word that silly little girl said this afternoon. She drew pictures in her notebook! this is the third time the word cave has come up in reports of Madam Westfall's mutterings. Did she speak to you of caves?"
    Carla's mind was whirling. How had she heard what they had said? Did maturity also bestow magical abilities? She said, "Yes, Madam, she spoke of hiding in a cave. "
    "Where is the cave, Carla? Where is it?"
    "I don't know, Madam. She didn't say. "
    Madam Trudeau started to pace once more. Her pale face was drawn in lines of concentration that carved deeply into her flesh, two furrows straight up from the inner brows, other lines at the sides of her nose, straight to her chin, her mouth tight and hard. Suddenly she sat down and leaned back in the chair. "Carla, in the last four or five years Madam Westfall became childishly senile; she was no longer living in the