Programmed for Peril

already taken of her. In hopes of lightening the psychological burden of motherhood she asked him to marry her. He laughed— deliberately fiendishly, she thought.
    In time there came that moment when the child was raised above her torn and bloody loins for her admiration.
    Drugged and exhausted, she nonetheless felt her heart sink.
    The girl had red hair!
    Carson came to pick her and the child up two days later. She buckled herself into the convertible, the unfamiliar creature safely webbed into a car seat. He took an automatic pistol out of his pocket.
    “What’s that for?” she asked.
    “That was to use on you if the kid wasn’t perfect,” he said matter-of-factly. “I don’t hold it being a girl against you.”
    She stared disbelieving at him. His face carried evil secrets she couldn’t read.
    In the weeks immediately following she made the decision to stay with Carson for Melody’s sake. She was gambling that the reversal in his mental deterioration would continue. He was very well off financially. Castle Carson was clean and spacious, its grounds generous. The child would thrive. She told herself that someday she would change things, but she wasn’t sure just when. She remembered her late lover’s words: “a sudden, complete disappearance.”
    Nearly four years passed. In later times she blocked out what might be called Carson’s and her intimate moments. Her memories overflowed instead with the unfolding joys of motherhood. Asked earlier, she would have scoffed at her nurturing capacity. Surprise! She took to Melody like lighting to a tall pine.
    She was an easy child to love—even-tempered and gentle. In her eighteenth month she surprised Trish by reacting to radio rock. She beat time with her right hand. Shortly afterward she began to sing along—not the words, of course, just the tunes.
    She was never off-key.
    Carson was quick to be fascinated and to encourage this unusual talent. When Melody was two he gave her a mouth organ. She needed only a week of huffing and puffing to learn how to play the melodies that were already accumulating in her curly red head. At three he bought her a kazoo and slide whistle.
    Two hours to learn to get music out of both.
    Melody sat for hours tootling recognizable tunes. Trish sang to her—and back came the melodies kazooed or whistled with unfailing accuracy.
    On her fourth birthday they gave her a soprano recorder. She sparkled and bubbled. “I can get so many more notes now!” she said with a laugh.
    Shortly afterward she discovered she was able to whistle. And whistle she did! She would begin with the tune as she had heard it, then wander off into similar ones that Trish dimly realized were versions in different keys.
    Proud mother was delighted with her child’s talent. It was a generous bonus to the gift of Melody’s existence. Where would Trish be without her?
    She thanked her daughter not only for helping her to keep her sanity, but for keeping her alive. Carson never threatened her in the child’s presence. Realizing that, she kept Melody with her continually. As the girl’s third year passed her father’s personality resumed its decline. While formerly continually busy and balanced, now long moments of inactivity appeared in his days like holes in cloth emerging from a loom. He sat staring, silent, mind screwed into some distant, incomprehensible wood.
    The unfamiliar woolgathering was interrupted by periods in which he again became the inspired satyr. Without the shield of pregnancy Trish had to endure his relentlessly more imaginative and painful attentions. During the worst of them she would have wanted to die—if she hadn’t experienced such exquisite pleasure and wasn’t a mother.
    Thus it became plain that she was bound to him by two things: his inhuman sexuality and his being Melody’s father. The first was destroying her; she was deeply addicted to pleasure-through-submission. The second she hated to accept. She had so hoped that Ron...
    A phone conversation with a friend while Carson was away turned to a recent court case in which determining paternity played a big role. Attorneys had settled the matter with the help of the testimony of a doctor who had presented irrefutable DNA-related evidence. Trish imagined she didn’t need state-of-the-art methods to prove what two heads of red hair in the same house strongly suggested. Nonetheless, on a whim she asked her friend, “Do you remember the doctor’s name?”
    She phoned Dr.