by Lisa Yaszek
“Did they?”
“Some of them answered,” said Tim, “but nearly all of them told me to go to somebody near me. Several said they were very busy men. Some gave me the name of a few books, but none of them told me to write again, and . . . and I was only a little boy. Nine years old, so I couldn’t talk to anybody. When I thought it over, I knew that I couldn’t very well join any church so young, unless it was my grandparents’ church. I keep on going there—it is a good church and it teaches a great deal of truth, I am sure. I’m reading all I can find, so when I am old enough I’ll know what I must do. How old would you say I should be, Peter?”
“College age,” replied Welles. “You are going to college? By then, any of the pastors would talk to you—except those that are too busy!”
“It’s a moral problem, really. Have I the right to wait? But I have to wait. It’s like telling lies—I have to tell some lies, but I hate to. If I have a moral obligation to join the true church as soon as I find it, well, what then? I can’t, until I’m eighteen or twenty?”
“If you can’t, you can’t. I should think that settles it. You are legally a minor, under the control of your grandparents, and while you might claim the right to go where your conscience leads you, it would be impossible to justify and explain your choice without giving yourself away entirely—just as you are obliged to go to school until you are at least eighteen, even though you know more than most Ph.D.’s. It’s all part of the game, and He who made you must understand that.”
“I’ll never tell you any lies,” said Tim. “I was getting so desperately lonely—my pen pals didn’t know anything about me really. I told them only what was right for them to know. Little kids are satisfied to be with other people but when you get a little older you have to make friends, really.”
“Yes, that’s a part of growing up. You have to reach out to others and share thoughts with them. You’ve kept to yourself too long as it is.”
“It wasn’t that I wanted to. But without a real friend, it was only pretense, and I never could let my playmates know anything about me. I studied them and wrote stories about them and it was all of them, but it was only a tiny part of me.”
“I’m proud to be your friend, Tim. Every man needs a friend. I’m proud that you trust me.”
Tim patted the cat a moment in silence and then looked up with a grin.
“How would you like to hear my favorite joke?” he asked.
“Very much,” said the psychiatrist, bracing himself for almost any major shock.
“It’s records. I recorded this from a radio program.”
Welles listened. He knew little of music, but the symphony which he heard pleased him. The announcer praised it highly in little speeches before and after each movement. Timothy giggled.
“Like it?”
“Very much. I don’t see the joke.”
“I wrote it.”
“Tim, you’re beyond me! But I still don’t get the joke.”
“The joke is that I did it by mathematics. I calculated what ought to sound like joy, grief, hope, triumph, and all the rest, and—it was just after I had studied harmony; you know how mathematical that is.”
Speechless, Welles nodded.
“I worked out the rhythms from different metabolisms—the way you function when under the influences of these emotions; the way your metabolic rate varies, your heartbeats and respiration and things. I sent it to the director of that orchestra, and he didn’t get the idea that it was a joke—of course I didn’t explain—he produced the music. I get nice royalties from it, too.”
“You’ll be the death of me yet,” said Welles in deep sincerity. “Don’t tell me anything more today; I couldn’t take it. I’m going home. Maybe by tomorrow I’ll see the joke and come back to laugh. Tim, did you ever fail at anything?”
“There are two cabinets full of articles and stories that didn’t sell. Some of them I feel bad about. There was the chess story. You know, in ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ it wasn’t a very good game, and you couldn’t see the relation of the moves to the story very well.”
“I never could see it at all.”
“I thought it would be fun to take a championship game and write a fantasy about it, as if it were a war between two little old countries, with knights and foot-soldiers, and fortified walls in charge of captains, and the bishops couldn’t fight like warriors, and, of course, the queens were women—people don’t kill them, not in hand-to-hand fighting and . . . well, you see? I wanted to make up the attacks and captures, and keep the people alive, a fairy-tale war you see, and make the strategy of the game and the strategy of the war coincide, and have everything fit. It took me ever so long to work it out and write it. To understand the game as a chess game and then to translate it into human actions and motives, and put speeches to it to fit different kinds of people. I’ll show it to you. I loved it. But nobody would print it. Chess players don’t like fantasy, and nobody else likes chess. You have to have a very special kind of mind to like both. But it was a disappointment. I hoped it would be published, because the few people who like that sort of thing would like it very much.”
“I’m sure I’ll like it.”
“Well, if you do like that sort of thing, it’s what you’ve been waiting all your life in vain for. Nobody else has done it.” Tim stopped, and blushed as red as a beet. “I see what grandmother means. Once you get started bragging, there’s no end to it. I’m sorry, Peter.”
“Give me the story. I don’t mind, Tim—brag all you like to me; I understand. You might blow up if you never express any of your legitimate pride and pleasure in such achievements. What I don’t understand is how you have kept it all under for so long.”
“I had to,” said Tim.
The story was all its young author had claimed. Welles chuckled as he read it, that evening. He read it again, and checked all the moves and the strategy of them. It was really a fine piece of work. Then he thought of the symphony, and this time he was able to laugh. He sat up until after midnight, thinking about the boy. Then he took a sleeping pill and went to bed.
The next day he went to see Tim’s grandmother. Mrs. Davis received him graciously.
“Your grandson is a very interesting boy,” said Peter Welles carefully. “I’m asking a favor of you. I am making a study of various boys and girls in this district, their abilities and backgrounds and environment and character traits and things like that. No names will ever be mentioned, of course, but a statistical report will be kept, for ten years or longer, and some case histories might later be published. Could Timothy be included?”
“Timothy is such a good, normal little boy, I fail to see what would be the purpose of including him in such a survey.”
“That is just the point. We are not interested in maladjusted persons in this study. We eliminate all psychotic boys and girls. We are interested in boys and girls who succeed in facing their youthful problems and making satisfactory adjustments to life. If we could study a selected group of such children, and follow their progress for the next ten years at least—and then publish a summary of the findings, with no names used—”
“In that case, I see no objection,” said Mrs. Davis.
“If you’d tell me, then, something about Timothy’s parents—their history?”
Mrs. Davis settled herself for a good long talk.
“Timothy’s mother, my only daughter, Emily,” she began, “was a lovely girl. So talented. She played the violin charmingly. Timothy is like her, in the face, but has his father’s dark hair and eyes. Edwin had very fine eyes.”
“Edwin was Timothy’s father?”
“Yes. The young people met while Emily was at college in the East. Edwin was studying atomics there.”
“Your daughter was studying music?”
“No; Emily was taking the regular liberal arts course. I can tell you
little about Edwin’s work, but after their marriage he returned to it and . . . you understand, it is painful for me to recall this, but their deaths were such a blow to me. They were so young.”
Welles held his pencil ready to write.
“Timothy has never been told. After all, he must grow up in this world, and how dreadfully the world has changed in the past thirty years, Dr. Welles! But you would not remember the day before 1945. You have heard, no doubt of the terrible explosion in the atomic plant, when they were trying to make a new type of bomb? At the time, none of the workers seemed to be injured. They believed the protection was adequate. But two years later they were all dead or dying.”
Mrs. Davis shook her head, sadly. Welles held his breath, bent his head, scribbled.
“Tim was born just fourteen months after the explosion, fourteen months to the day. Everyone still thought that no harm had been done. But the radiation had some effect which was very slow—I do not understand such things—Edwin died, and then Emily came home to us with the boy. In a few months she, too, was gone.
“Oh, but we do not sorrow as those who have no hope. It is hard to have lost her, Dr. Welles, but Mr. Davis and I have reached the time of life when we can look forward to seeing her again. Our hope is to live until Timothy is old enough to fend for himself. We were so anxious about him; but you see he is perfectly normal in every way.”
“Yes.”
“The specialists made all sorts of tests. But nothing is wrong with Timothy.”
The psychiatrist stayed a little longer, took a few more notes, and made his escape as soon as he could. Going straight to the school, he had a few words with Miss Page and then took Tim to his office, where he told him what he had learned.
“You mean—I’m a mutation?”
“A mutant. Yes, very likely you are. I don’t know. But I had to tell you at once.”
“Must be a dominant, too,” said Tim, “coming out this way in the first generation. You mean—there may be more? I’m not the only one?” he added in great excitement. “Oh, Peter, even if I grow up past you I won’t have to be lonely?”
There. He had said it.
“It could be, Tim. There’s nothing else in your family that could account for you.”
“But I have never found anyone at all like me. I would have known. Another boy or girl my age—like me—I would have known.”
“You came West with your mother. Where did the others go, if they existed? The parents must have scattered everywhere, back to their homes all over the country, all over the world. We can trace them, though. And, Tim haven’t you thought it’s just a little bit strange that with all your pen names and various contacts, people don’t insist more on meeting you? People don’t ask about you? Everything gets done by mail? It’s almost as if the editors are used to people who hide. It’s almost as if people are used to architects and astronomers and composers whom nobody ever sees, who are only names in care of other names at post office boxes. There’s a chance—just a chance, mind you—that there are others. If there are we’ll find them.”
“I’ll work out a code they will understand,” said Tim, his face screwed up in concentration. “In articles—I’ll do it—several magazines and in letters I can inclose copies—some of my pen friends may be the ones—”
“I’ll hunt up the records—they must be on file somewhere—psychologists and psychiatrists know all kinds of tricks—we can make some excuse to trace them all—the birth records—”
Both of them were talking at once, but all the while Peter Welles was thinking sadly, perhaps he had lost Tim now. If they did find those others, those to whom Tim rightfully belonged, where would poor Peter be? Outside, among the puppies—
Timothy Paul looked up and saw Peter Welles’ eyes on him. He smiled.
“You were my first friend, Peter, and you shall be forever,” said Tim. “No matter what, no matter who.”
“But we must look for the others,” said Peter.
“I’ll never forget who helped me,” said Tim.
An ordinary boy of thirteen may say such a thing sincerely, and a week later have forgotten all about it. But Peter Welles was content. Tim would never forget, Tim would be his friend always. Even when Timothy Paul and those like him should unite in a maturity undreamed of, to control the world if they chose. Peter Welles would be Tim’s friend—not a puppy, but a beloved friend—as a loyal dog, loved by a good master, is never cast out.
1948
KATHERINE MACLEAN
Contagion
IT was like an Earth forest in the fall, but it was not fall. The forest leaves were green and copper and purple and fiery red, and a wind sent patches of bright greenish sunlight dancing among the leaf shadows.
The hunt party of the Explorer filed along the narrow trail, guns ready, walking carefully, listening to the distant, half familiar cries of strange birds.
A faint crackle of static in their earphones indicated that a gun had been fired.
“Got anything?” asked June Walton. The helmet intercom carried her voice to the ears of the others without breaking the stillness of the forest.
“Took a shot at something,” explained George Barton’s cheerful voice in her earphones. She rounded a bend of the trail and came upon Barton standing peering up into the trees, his gun still raised. “It looked like a duck.”
“This isn’t Central Park,” said Hal Barton, his brother, coming into sight. His green spacesuit struck an incongruous note against the bronze and red forest. “They won’t all look like ducks,” he said soberly.
“Maybe some will look like dragons. Don’t get eaten by a dragon, June,” came Max’s voice quietly into her earphones. “Not while I still love you.” He came out of the trees carrying the blood sample kit, and touched her glove with his, the grin on his ugly beloved face barely visible in the mingled light and shade. A patch of sunlight struck a greenish glint from his fishbowl helmet.
They walked on. A quarter of a mile back, the spaceship Explorer towered over the forest like a tapering skyscraper, and the people of the ship looked out of the viewplates at fresh winds and sunlight and clouds, and they longed to be outside.
But the likeness to Earth was danger, and the cool wind might be death, for if the animals were like Earth animals, their diseases might be like Earth diseases, alike enough to be contagious, different enough to be impossible to treat. There was warning enough in the past. Colonies had vanished, and traveled spaceways drifted with the corpses of ships which had touched on some plague planet.
The people of the ship waited while their doctors, in airtight spacesuits, hunted animals to test them for contagion.
The four medicos, for June Walton was also a doctor, filed through the alien homelike forest, walking softly, watching for motion among the copper and purple shadows.
They saw it suddenly, a lighter moving copper patch among the darker browns. Reflex action swung June’s gun into line, and behind her someone’s gun went off with a faint crackle of static, and made a hole in the leaves beside the specimen. Then for a while no one moved.
This one looked like a man, a magnificently muscled, leanly graceful, humanlike animal. Even in its callused bare feet, it was a head taller than any of them. Red-haired, hawk-faced and darkly tanned, it stood breathing heavily, looking at them without expression. At its side hung a sheath knife, and a crossbow was slung across one wide shoulder.
They lowered their guns.
“It needs a shave,” Max said reasonably in their earphones, and he reached up to his helmet and flipped the switch that let his voice be heard. “Something we could do for you, Mac?”
The friendly drawl was the first voice that had broken the forest sounds. June smiled suddenly. He was right. The strict logic of evolution did not demand beards; therefore a non-human would not be wearing a three day growth of red stubble.
Sti
ll panting, the tall figure licked dry lips and spoke. “Welcome to Minos. The Mayor sends greetings from Alexandria.”
“English?” gasped June.
“We were afraid you would take off again before I could bring word to you. . . . It’s three hundred miles. . . . We saw your scout plane pass twice, but we couldn’t attract its attention.”
June looked in stunned silence at the stranger leaning against the tree. Thirty-six light years—thirty-six times six trillion miles of monotonous space travel—to be told that the planet was already settled! “We didn’t know there was a colony here,” she said. “It is not on the map.”
“We were afraid of that,” the tall bronze man answered soberly. “We have been here three generations and yet no traders have come.”
Max shifted the kit strap on his shoulder and offered a hand. “My name is Max Stark, M.D. This is June Walton, M.D., Hal Barton, M.D., and George Barton, Hal’s brother, also M.D.”
“Patrick Mead is the name,” smiled the man, shaking hands casually. “Just a hunter and bridge carpenter myself. Never met any medicos before.”
The grip was effortless but even through her airproofed glove June could feel that the fingers that touched hers were as hard as padded steel.
“What—what is the population of Minos?” she asked.
He looked down at her curiously for a moment before answering. “Only one hundred and fifty.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, this isn’t a city planet yet. There’s room for a few more people.” He shook hands with the Bartons quickly. “That is—you are people, aren’t you?” he asked startlingly.
