 Where is the Farm?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, August 1957. MOTHER GOOSE Dr. David Lessing found Jack Dorffman and the boy waiting in his office when he arrived at the Hoffman Center that morning. "He's gone completely hay-wire. Nobody's been able to get near him for three weeks, and now at six o'clock this morning he decides he's leaving the Farm. The first was from Roberts Bros., announcing another shift of deadline on the book, and demanding the galley proofs two weeks earlier than scheduled. As director of psionic research at the Hoffman Medical Center, he had long since learned how administrative detail could suck up daytime hours. "A Theory of Psionic Influence on Infant and Child Development." When they were finally forced to recognize that this great and powerful force did indeed exist in human minds, with unimaginable potential if it could only be unlocked, they had plunged eagerly into the search, and found themselves in a maddening bramble bush of contradictions and chaos. And the more they struggled, the thicker and more impenetrable the bramble bush became— But now David Lessing had discovered a pathway through that jungle, a theory to work by— At his elbow the intercom buzzed. "Within the stronghold of psionic research at last. "I think you'd better wait before you do that," Melrose said sharply, "because I'm planning to take you apart at the Conference next month unless I like everything I see and hear down here today. "I want to hear this fairy tale you're about to publish in the name of 'Theory'," Melrose said. "I want to see this famous Farm of yours up in Connecticut and see for myself how much pressure these experimental controls you keep talking about will actually bear. "So far, we haven't found any way to set up logical controls," said Melrose. Ten minutes later they rode the elevator down to the transit levels and boarded the little shuttle car in the terminal below the Hoffman Center. They sat in silence as the car dipped down into the rapid-transit channels beneath the great city, swinging northward in the express circuit through Philadelphia and Camden sectors, surfacing briefly in Trenton sector, then dropping underground once again for the long pull beneath Newark, Manhattan and Westchester sectors. In less than twenty minutes the car surfaced on a Parkway channel and buzzed north and east through the verdant Connecticut countryside. "Until we had to throw it out. "In fact, you can't really be certain that your instruments are measuring the children at all.
 Connecticut
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