The Best Science Fiction of 1949

by Everett F. Bleiler

  “Well gosh! I wouldn’t have come” Tim was stammering in confusion. “You ought to be paid. I take up so much of your time. Maybe I’d better not come any more.”

  “I think you’d better. Don’t you?”

  “Why are you doing it for nothing. Dr. Welles?”

  “I think you know why.” The boy sat down in the glider and pushed himself meditatively back and forth. The glider squeaked.

  “You’re interested. You’re curious,” he said.

  “That’s not all, Tim.” Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.

  “I know,” said Timothy. “I believe it. Look, is it all right if I call you Peter? Since we’re friends.”

  At their next meeting, Timothy went into details about his newspaper. He had kept all the copies, from the first smudged, awkwardly printed pencil issues to the very latest neatly typed ones. But he would not show Welles any of them.

  “I just put down every day the things I most wanted to say, the news or information or opinion I had to swallow unsaid. So it’s a wild medley. The earlier copies are awfully funny. Sometimes I guess what they were all about, what made me write them. Sometimes I remember. I put down the books I read too, and mark them like school grades, on two points—how I liked the book, and whether it was good.

  And whether I had read it before, too.”

  “How many books do you read? What’s your reading speed?”

  It proved that Timothys reading speed on new books of adult level varied from eight hundred to nine hundred fifty words a minute. The average murder mystery—he loved them—took him a little less than an hour. A year’s homework in history, Tim performed easily by reading his textbook through three or four times during the year. He apologized for that, but explained that he had to know what was in the book so as not to reveal in examinations too much that he had learned from other sources. Evenings, when his grandparents believed him to be doing homework he spent his time reading other books, or writing his newspaper, “or something.” As Welles had already guessed, Tim had read everything in his grandfather’s library, everything of interest in the public library that was not on the closed shelves, and everything he could order from the state library.

  “What do the librarians say?”

  “They think the books are for my grandfather. I tell them that, if they ask what a little boy wants with such a big book, Peter, telling so many lies is what gets me down. I have to do it, don’t I?”

  “As far as I can see, you do,” agreed Welles, “But here’s material for a while in my library. There’ll have to be a closed shelf here, too, though, Tim.”

  “Could you tell me why? I know about the library books. Some of them might scare people, and some are—”

  “Some of my books might scare you too, Tim. I’ll tell you a little about abnormal psychology if you like, one of these days, and then I think you’ll see that until you’re actually trained to deal with such cases, you’d be better off not knowing too much about them.”

  “I don’t want to be morbid,” agreed Tim. “All right. I’ll read only what you give me. And from now on I’ll tell you things. There was more than the newspaper, you know.”

  “I thought as much. Do you want to go on with your tale?”

  “It started when I first wrote a letter to a newspaper—of course, under a pen name. They printed it. For a while I had a high old time of it—a letter almost every day, using all sorts of pen names. Then I branched out to magazines, letters to the editor again. And stories1 tried stories.” He looked a little doubtfully at Welles, who said only:

  “How old were you when you sold the first story?”

  “Eight,” said Timothy. “And when the check came, with my name on it, ‘T. Paul,’ I didn’t know what in the world to do.”

  “That’s a thought. What did you do?”

  “There was a sign in the window of the bank. I always read signs, and that one came back to my mind. ‘Banking By Mail.’ You can see I was pretty desperate. So I got the name of a bank across the Bay and I wrote them—on my typewriter—and said I wanted to start an account, and here was a check to start it with. Oh, I was scared stiff, and had to keep saying to myself that, after all, nobody could do much to me. It was my own money. But you don’t know what it’s like to be only a small boy! They sent the check back to me and I died ten deaths when I saw it. But the letter explained. I hadn’t endorsed it. They sent me a blank to fill out about myself. I didn’t know how many lies I dared to tell. But it was my money and I had to get it. If I could get it into the bank, then some day I could get it out. I gave my business as ‘author’ and I gave my age as twenty-four. I thought that was awfully old.”

  “I’d like to see the story. Do you have a copy of the magazine around?”

  “Yes,” said Tim. “But nobody noticed it-I mean, ‘T. Paul’ could be anybody. And when I saw magazines for writers on the newsstands and bought them, I got on to the way to use a pen name on the story and my own name and address up in the comer. Before that I used a pen name and sometimes never got the things back or heard about them. Sometimes I did, though.”

  “What then?”

  “Oh, then I’d endorse the check payable to me and sign the pen name, and then sign my own name under it. Was I scared to do that! But it was my money.”

  “Only stories?”

  “Articles, too. And things. That’s enough of that for today. Only I just wanted to say—a while ago, T. Paul told the bank he wanted to switch some of the money over to a checking account. To buy books by mail, and such. So, I could pay you. Dr. Welles,” with sudden formality.

  “No, Tim,” said Peter Welles firmly. “The pleasure is all mine. What I want is to see the story that was published when you were eight. And some of the other things that made T. Paul rich enough to keep a consulting psychiatrist on the payroll. And, for the love of Pete, will you tell me how all this goes on without your grandparents’ knowing a thing about it?”

  “Grandmother thinks I send in box tops and fill out coupons,” said Tim. “She doesn’t bring in the mail. She says her little boy gets such a big bang out of that little chore. Anyway that’s what she said when I was eight. I played mailman. And there were box tops1 showed them to her, until she said, about the third time, that really she wasn’t greatly interested in such matters. By now she has the habit of waiting for me to bring in the mail.”

  Peter Welles thought that was quite a day of revelation. He spent a quiet evening at home, holding his head and groaning, trying to take it all in.

  And that IQ 120, nonsense! The boy had been holding out on him. Tim’s reading had obviously included enough about IQ tests, enough puzzles and oddments in magazines and such, to enable him to stall successfully. What could he do if he would co-operate?

  Welles made up his mind to find out.

  He didn’t find out. Timothy Paul went swiftly through the whole range of Superior Adult tests without a failure of any sort. There were no tests yet devised that could measure his intelligence. While he was still writing his age with one figure, Timothy Paul had faced alone, and solved alone, problems that would have baffled the average adult. He had adjusted to the hardest task of all—that of appearing to be a fairly normal, B-average small boy.

  And it must be that there was more to find out about him. What did he write? And what did he do besides read and write, learn carpentry and breed cats and magnificently fool his whole world?

  When Peter Welles had read some of Tim’s writings, he was surprised to find that the stories the boy had written were vividly human, the product of close observation of human nature. The articles, on the other hand, were closely reasoned and showed thorough study and research. Apparently Tim read every word of several newspapers and a score or more of periodicals.

  “Oh, sure,” said Tim, when questioned. “I read everything. I go back once in a while and review old ones, too.”

  “If you can write like this,” demanded Welles, indicating a magazine in which a staid and scholarly ar
ticle had appeared, “and this”—this was a man-to-man political article giving the arguments for and against a change in the whole Congressional system—then why do you always talk to me in the language of an ordinary stupid schoolboy?”

  “Because I’m only a boy,” replied Timothy. “What would happen if I went around talking like that?”

  “You might risk it with me. You’ve showed me these things.”

  “I’d never dare to risk talking like that. I might forget and do it again before others. Besides, I can’t pronounce half the words.”

  “What!”

  “I never look up a pronunciation,” explained Timothy. “In case I do slip and use a word beyond the average, I can anyway hope I didn’t say it right.”

  Welles shouted with laughter, but was sober again as he realized the implications back of that thoughtfulness.

  “You’re just like an explorer living among savages,” said the psychiatrist. “You have studied the savages carefully and tried to imitate them so they won’t know there are differences.”

  “Something like that,” acknowledged Tim.

  “That’s why your stories are so human,” said Welles. “That one about the awful little girl”

  They both chuckled.

  “Yes, that was my first story,” said Tim. “I was almost eight, and there was a boy in my class who had a brother, and the boy next door was the other one, the one who was picked on.”

  “How much of the story was true?”

  “The first part. I used to see, when I went over there, how that girl picked on Bill’s brother’s friend, Steve. She wanted to play with Steve all the time herself and whenever he had boys over, she’d do something awful. And Steve’s folks were like I said—they wouldn’t let Steve do anything to a girl. When she threw all the watermelon rinds over the fence into his yard, he just had to pick them all up and say nothing back; and she’d laugh at him over the fence. She got him blamed for things he never did, and when he had work to do in the yard she’d hang out of her window and scream at him and make fun. I thought first, what made her act like that, and then I made up a way for him to get even with her, and wrote it out the way it might have happened.”

  “Didn’t you pass the idea on to Steve and let him try it?”

  “Gosh, no! I was only a little boy. Kids seven don’t give ideas to kids ten. That’s the first thing I had to learn—to be always the one that kept quiet, especially if there was any older boy or girl around, even only a year or two older. I had to learn to look blank and let my mouth hang open and say, 1 don’t get it,’ to almost everything.”

  “And Miss Page thought it was odd that you had no close friends of your own age,” said Welles. “You must be the loneliest boy that e’er walked this earth, Tim. You’ve lived in hiding like a criminal. But tell me, what are you afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid of being found out, of course. The only way I can live in this world is in disguise—until I’m grown up, at any rate. At first it was just my grandparents’ scolding me and telling me not to show off, and the way people laughed if I tried to talk to them. Then I saw how people hate anyone who is better or brighter or luckier. Some people sort of trade off; if you’re bad at one thing you’re good at another, but they’ll forgive you for being good at some things, if you’re not good at others so they can balance it off. They can beat you at something. You have to strike a balance. A child has no chance at all. No grownup can stand it to have a child know anything he doesn’t. Oh, a little thing if it amuses them. But not much of anything. There’s an old story about a man who found himself in a country where everyone else was blind. I’m like that—but they shan’t put out my eyes. I’ll never let them know I can see anything.”

  “Do you see things that no grown person can see?” Tim waved his hand towards the magazines.

  “Only like that, I meant. I hear people talking in street cars and stores, and while they work, and around. I read about the way they act in the news. I’m like them, just like them, only I seem about a hundred years older—more matured.”

  “Do you mean that none of them have much sense?”

  “I don’t mean that exactly. I mean that so few of them have any, or show it if they do have. They don’t even seem to want to. They’re good people in their way, but what could they make of me? Even when I was seven, I could understand their motives, but they couldn’t understand their own motives. And they’re so lazy—they don’t seem to want to know or to understand. When I first went to the library for books, the books I learned from were seldom touched by any of the grown people. But they were meant for ordinary grown people. But the grown people didn’t want to know things—they only wanted to fool around. I feel about most people the way my grandmother feels about babies and puppies. Only she doesn’t have to pretend to be a puppy all the time,” Tim added, with a little bitterness.

  “You have a friend now, in me.”

  “Yes, Peter,” said Tim, brightening up. “And I have pen friends, too. People like what I write, because they can’t see I’m only a little boy. When I grow up—”

  Tim did not finish that sentence. Welles understood, now, some of the fears that Tim had not dared to put into words at all. When he grew up, would he be as far beyond all other grownups as he had, all his life, been above his contemporaries? The adult friends whom he now met on fairly equal terms-would they then, too, seem like babies or puppies?

  Peter did not dare to voice the thought, either. Still less did he venture to hint at another thought. Tim, so far, had no great interest in girls; they existed for him as part of the human race, but there would come a time when Tim would be a grown man and would wish to marry. And where among the puppies could he find a mate?

  “When you’re grown up, we’ll still be friends,” said Peter.

  “And who are the others?” It turned out that Tim had pen friends all over the world. He played chess by correspondence—a game he never dared to play in person, except when he forced himself to move the pieces about idly and let his opponent win at least half the time. He had, also, many friends who had read something he had written, and had written to him about it, thus starting a correspondence-friendship. After the first two or three of these, he had started some on his own account, always with people who lived at a great distance. To most of these he gave a name which, although not false, looked it. That was Paul T. Lawrence. Lawrence was his middle name; and with a comma after the Paul, it was actually his own name. He had a post office box under that name, for which T. Paul of the large bank account was his reference.

  “Pen friends abroad? Do you know languages?” Yes, Tim did. He had studied by correspondence, also; many universities gave extension courses in that manner, and lent the student records to play so that he could learn the correct pronunciation. Tim had taken several such courses, and learned other languages from books. He kept all these languages in practice by means of the letters to other lands and the replies which came to him.

  “I’d buy a dictionary, and then I’d write to the mayor of some town, or to a foreign newspaper, and ask them to advertise for some pen friends to help me learn the language. We’d exchange souvenirs and things.”

  Nor was Welles in the least surprised to find that Timothy had also taken other courses by correspondence. He had completed, within three years, more than half the subjects offered by four separate universities, and several other courses, the most recent being Architecture. The boy, not yet fourteen, had competed a full course in that subject, and had he been able to disguise himself as a full-grown man, could have gone out at once and built almost anything you’d like to name, for he also knew much of the trades involved.

  “It always said how long an average student took, and I’d take that long,” said Tim, “so, of course, I had to be working several schools at the same time.”

  “And carpentry at the playground summer school?”

  “Oh, yes. But there I couldn’t do too much, because people could see me. But I learned how, a
nd it made a good cover-up, so I could make cages for the cats, and all that sort of thing. And many boys are good with their hands. I like to work with my hands. I built my own radio, too—it gets all the foreign stations, and that helps me with my languages.”

  “How did you figure it out about the cats?” said Welles.

  “Oh, there had to be recessives, that’s all. The Siamese coloring was a recessive, and it had to be mated with another recessive. Black was one possibility, and white was another, but I started with black because I liked it better. I might try white too, but I have so much else on my mind” He broke off suddenly and would say no more.

  Their next meeting was by prearrangement at Tim’s workshop. Welles met the boy after school and they walked to Tim’s home together; there the boy unlocked his door and snapped on the lights.

  Welles looked around with interest. There was a bench, a tool chest. Cabinets, padlocked. A radio, clearly not store purchased. A file cabinet, locked. Something on a table, covered with a cloth. A box in the corner—no, two boxes in two corners. In each of them was a mother cat with kittens. Both mothers were black Persians.

  “This one must be all black Persian,” Tim explained. “Her third litter and never a Siamese marking. But this one carries both recessives in her. Last time she had a Siamese shorthaired kitten. This morning1 had to go to school. Let’s see.” They bent over the box where the new-born kittens lay. One kitten was like the mother. The other two were Siamese-Persian; a male and a female.

  “You’ve done it again, Tim!” shouted Welles. “Congratulations!”

  They shook hands in jubilation.

  “I’ll write it in the record,” said the boy blissfully. In a nickel book marked “Compositions” Tim’s left hand added the entries. He had used the correct symbolsFi, Fs, Fs; Ss, Bl.

  “The dominants in capitals,” he explained, “B for black, and S for short hair; the recessives in small letters—s for Siamese, l for long hair. Wonderful to write ll or ss again, Peter! Twice more. And the other kitten is carrying the Siamese marking as a recessive.”