“He can too!” Her facts impugned, Janie went to the task with a will. The next answer was, “Put great big wide wheels on it.”
“Suppose you ain’t got money nor time nor tools for that?”
This time it was, “Make it real heavy where the ground is hard and real light where the ground is soft and anything in between.”
Janie very nearly went on strike when Lone demanded to know how this could be accomplished and reached something of a peak of impatience when Lone rejected the suggestion of loading and unloading rocks. She complained that not only was this silly, but that Baby was matching every fact she fed him with every other fact he had been fed previously and was giving correct but unsolicited answers to situational sums of tires plus weight plus soup plus bird’s nests, and babies plus soft dirt plus wheel diameters plus straw. Lone doggedly clung to his basic question and the day’s impasse was reached when it was determined that there was such a way but it could not be expressed except by facts not in Lone’s or Janie’s possession. Janie said it sounded to her like radio tubes and with only that to go on, Lone proceeded by entering the next night a radio service shop and stealing a heavy armload of literature. He bulled along unswerving, unstoppable, until at last Janie relinquished her opposition because she had not energy for it and for the research as well. For days she scanned elementary electricity and radio texts which meant nothing to her but which apparently Baby could absorb faster than she scanned.
And at last the specifications were met: something which Lone could make himself, which would involve only a small knob you pushed to make the truck heavier and pulled to make it lighter, as well as an equally simple attachment to add power to the front wheels—according to Baby a sine qua non.
In the half-cave, half-cabin, with the fire smoking in the center of the room and the meat turning slowly in the updraft, with the help of two tongue-tied infants, a mongoloid baby and a sharp-tongued child who seemed to despise him but never failed him, Lone built the device. He did it, not because he was particularly interested in the thing for itself, nor because he wished to understand its principles (which were and would always be beyond him), but only because an old man who had taught him something he could not name was mad with bereavement and needed to work and could not afford a horse.
He walked most of the night with it and installed it in the dim early hours of the morning. The idea of “pleasant surprise” was far too whimsical a thing for Lone but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted it ready for the day’s work, without any time lost by the old man prancing around asking questions that he couldn’t answer.
The truck stood bogged in the field. Lone unwound the device from around his neck and shoulders and began to attach it according to the exact instructions he had winnowed out of Baby. There wasn’t much to do. A slender wire wrapped twice around the clutch housing outside and led to clamps on the front spring shackles, the little brushes touching the insides of the front wheels; and that was the front-wheel drive. Then the little box with its four silvery cables, box clamped to steering post, each cable leading to a corner of the frame.
He got in and pulled the knob toward him. The frame creaked as the truck seemed to raise itself on tiptoe. He pushed the knob forward. The truck settled its front axle and differential housing on solid ground with a bump that made his head rock. He looked at the little box and its lever admiringly, then returned the lever to a neutral position. He scanned the other controls there, the ones which came with the truck: pedals and knobs and sticks and buttons. He sighed.
He wished he had wit enough to drive a truck.
He got out and climbed the hill to the house to wake Prodd. Prodd wasn’t there. The kitchen door swung in the breeze, the glass gone out of it and lying on the stoop. Mud wasps were building under the sink. There was a smell of dirty dry floorboards, mildew, and ancient sweat. Otherwise it was fairly neat, about the way it was when he and Prodd had cleaned up last time he was here. The only new thing there aside from the mud wasps’ nest was a paper nailed to the wall by all four corners. It had writing all over it. Lone detached it as carefully as he could, and smoothed it out on the kitchen table, and turned it over twice. Then he folded it, put it in his pocket. Again he sighed.
He wished he had sense enough to learn to read.
He left the house without looking back and plunged into the forest. He never returned. The truck stood out in the sun, slowly deteriorating slowly weakening its already low resistance to rust, slowly falling to pieces around the bright, strong, strange silver cables. Powered inexhaustibly by the slow release of atomic binding energy, the device was the practical solution of flight without wings, the simple key to a new era in transportation, in materials handling, and in interplanetary travel. Made by an idiot, harnessed idiotically to replace a spavined horse, stupidly left, numbly forgotten … Earth’s first anti-gravity generator.
The idiot!
Dear loan I’ll nale this up wher you cant hep see it I am cleering ot of here I dont no why I stade as long as I did. Ma is back east Wmsport pennsilvana and she been gone a long time and I am tied of wating. And I was goin to sell the truck to hep me on the way but it is stuck so bad now I cant get it to town to sell it. So now I am jest goin to go whatever and I’ll make it some way long as I no Ma is at the othr end. Dont take no trouble about the place I guess I had enuf of it Anyway. And borrow any thing you want if you should want any Thing. You are a good boy you been a good frend well goodbeye until I see you if I ever do god Bless you your old frend E. Prodd.
Lone made Janie read him the letter four times in a three-week period, and each reading seemed to add a fresh element to the yeasty seething inside him. Much of this happened silently; for some of it he asked help.
He had believed that Prodd was his only contact with anything outside himself and that the children were merely fellow occupants of a slag dump at the edge of mankind. The loss of Prodd—and he knew with unshakeable certainty that he would never see the old man again—was the loss of life itself. At the very least, it was the loss of everything conscious, directed, cooperative; everything above and beyond what a vegetable could do by way of living.
“Ask Baby what is a friend.”
“He says it’s somebody who goes on loving you whether he likes you or not.”
But then, Prodd and his wife had shucked him off when he was in the way, after all those years, and that meant they were ready to do it the first year and the second and the fifth—all the time, any time. You can’t say you’re a part of anything, anybody, that feels free to do that to you. But friends … maybe they just don’t like him for a while, maybe they loved him all the way through.
“Ask Baby can you be truly part of someone you love.”
“He says only if you love yourself.”
His bench-mark, his goal-point, had for years been that thing which happened to him on the bank of the pool. He had to understand that. If he could understand that, he was sure he could understand everything. Because for a second there was this other, and himself, and a flow between them without guards or screens or barriers—no language to stumble over, no ideas to misunderstand, nothing at all but a merging.
What had he been then? What was it Janie had said?
Idiot. An idiot.
An idiot, she had said, was a grown person who could hear only babies’ silent speech. Then—what was the creature with whom he had merged on that terrible day?
“Ask Baby what is a grown person who can talk like the babies.”
“He says, an innocent.”
He had been an idiot who could hear the soundless murmur. She had been an innocent who, as an adult, could speak it.
“Ask Baby what if an idiot and an innocent are close together.”
“He says when they so much as touched, the innocent would stop being an innocent and the idiot would stop being an idiot.”
He thought. An innocent is the most beautiful thing there can be. Immediately he demanded of himself, What’s so beautiful about an innoc
ent? And the answer, for once almost as swift as Baby’s: It’s the waiting that’s beautiful.
Waiting for the end of innocence. And an idiot is waiting for the end of idiocy too, but he’s ugly doing it. So each ends himself in the meeting, in exchange for a merging.
Lone was suddenly deep-down glad. For if this was true, he had made something, rather than destroyed something … and when he had lost it, the pain of the loss was justified. When he had lost the Prodds the pain wasn’t worth it.
What am I doing? What am I doing? he thought wildly. Trying and trying like this to find out what I am and what I belong to…. Is this another aspect of being outcast, monstrous, different?
“Ask Baby what kind of people are all the time trying to find out what they are and what they belong to.”
“He says, every kind.”
“What kind,” Lone whispered, “am I, then?”
A full minute later he yelled, “What kind?”
“Shut up awhile. He doesn’t have a way to say it … uh … Here. He says he is a figure-outer brain and I am a body and the twins are arms and legs and you are the head. He says the ‘I’ is all of us.”
“I belong. I belong. Part of you, part of you and you too.”
“The head, silly.”
Lone thought his heart was going to burst. He looked at them all, every one: arms to flex and reach, a body to care and repair, a brainless but faultless computer and—the head to direct it.
“And we’ll grow, Baby. We just got born!”
“He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won’t. He says we’re a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot.”
So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain.
2
BABY IS THREE
I FINALLY GOT IN TO see this Stern. He wasn’t an old man at all. He looked up from his desk, flicked his eyes over me once, and picked up a pencil. “Sit over there, Sonny.”
I stood where I was until he looked up again. Then I said, “Look, if a midget walks in here, what do you say—sit over there, Shorty?”
He put the pencil down again and stood up. He smiled. His smile was as quick and sharp as his eyes. “I was wrong,” he said, “but how am I supposed to know you don’t want to be called Sonny?”
That was better, but I was still mad. “I’m fifteen and I don’t have to like it. Don’t rub my nose in it.”
He smiled again and said okay, and I went and sat down.
“What’s your name?”
“Gerard.”
“First or last?”
“Both,” I said.
“Is that the truth?”
I said, “No. And don’t ask me where I live either.”
He put down his pencil. “We’re not going to get very far this way.”
“That’s up to you. What are you worried about? I got feelings of hostility? Well, sure I have. I got lots more things than that wrong with me or I wouldn’t be here. Are you going to let that stop you?”
“Well, no, but—”
“So what else is bothering you? How you’re going to get paid?” I took out a thousand-dollar bill and laid it on the desk. “That’s so you won’t have to bill me. You keep track of it. Tell me when it’s used up and I’ll give you more. So you don’t need my address. Wait,” I said, when he reached toward the money. “Let it lay here. I want to be sure you and I are going to get along.”
He folded his hands. “I don’t do business this way, Son—I mean, Gerard.”
“Gerry,” I told him. “You do, if you do business with me.”
“You make things difficult, don’t you? Where did you get a thousand dollars?”
“I won a contest. Twenty-five words or less about how much fun it is to do my daintier thing with Sudso.” I leaned forward. “This time it’s the truth.”
“All right,” he said.
I was surprised. I think he knew it, but he didn’t say anything more. Just waited for me to go ahead.
“Before we start—if we start,” I said, “I got to know something. The things I say to you—what comes out while you’re working on me—is that just between us, like a priest or a lawyer?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“No matter what?”
“No matter what.”
I watched him when he said it. I believed him.
“Pick up your money,” I said. “You’re on.”
He didn’t do it. He said, “As you remarked a minute ago, that is up to me. You can’t buy these treatments like a candy bar. We have to work together. If either one of us can’t do that, it’s useless. You can’t walk in on the first psychotherapist you find in the phone book and make any demand that occurs to you just because you can pay for it.”
I said tiredly, “I didn’t get you out of the phone book and I’m not just guessing that you can help me. I winnowed through a dozen or more head-shrinkers before I decided on you.”
“Thanks,” he said, and it looked as if he was going to laugh at me, which I never like. “Winnowed, did you say? Just how?”
“Things you hear, things you read. You know. I’m not saying, so just file that with my street address.”
He looked at me for a long time. It was the first time he’d used his eyes on me for anything but a flash glance. Then he picked up the bill.
“What do I do first?” I demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“How do we start?”
“We started when you walked in here.”
So then I had to laugh. “All right, you got me. All I had was an opening. I didn’t know where you would go from there, so I couldn’t be there ahead of you.”
“That’s very interesting,” Stern said. “Do you usually figure everything out in advance?”
“Always.”
“How often are you right?”
“All the time. Except—but I don’t have to tell you about no exceptions.”
He really grinned this time. “I see. One of my patients has been talking.”
“One of your ex-patients. Your patients don’t talk.”
“I ask them not to. That applies to you, too. What did you hear?”
“That you know from what people say and do what they’re about to say and do, and that sometimes you let’m do it and sometimes you don’t. How did you learn to do that?”
He thought a minute. “I guess I was born with an eye for details, and then let myself make enough mistakes with enough people until I learned not to make too many more. How did you learn to do it?”
I said, “You answer that and I won’t have to come back here.”
“You really don’t know?”
“I wish I did. Look, this isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?”
He shrugged. “Depends on where you want to go.” He paused, and I got the eyes full strength again. “Which thumbnail description of psychiatry do you believe at the moment?”
“I don’t get you.”
Stern slid open a desk drawer and took out a blackened pipe. He smelled it, turned it over while looking at me. “Psychiatry attacks the onion of the self, removing layer after layer until it gets down to the little sliver of unsullied ego. Or: psychiatry drills like an oil well, down and sidewise and down again, through all the muck and rock until it strikes a layer that yields. Or: psychiatry grabs a handful of sexual motivations and throws them on the pin-ball machine of your life, so they bounce on down against episodes. Want more?”
I had to laugh. “That last one was pretty good.”
“That last one was pretty bad. They are all bad. They all try to simplify something which is complex by its very nature. The only thumbnail you’ll get from me is this: no one knows what’s really wrong with you but you; no one can find a cure for it but you; no one but you can identify it as a cure; and once you find it, no one but you can do anything ab
out it.”
“What are you here for?”
“To listen.”
“I don’t have to pay somebody no day’s wages every hour just to listen.”
“True. But you’re convinced that I listen selectively.”
“Am I?” I wondered about it. “I guess I am. Well, don’t you?”
“No, but you’ll never believe that.”
I laughed. He asked me what that was for. I said, “You’re not calling me Sonny.”
“Not you.” He shook his head slowly. He was watching me while he did it, so his eyes slid in their sockets as his head moved. “What is it you want to know about yourself, that made you worried I might tell people?”
“I want to find out why I killed somebody,” I said right away.
It didn’t faze him a bit. “Lie down over there.”
I got up. “On that couch?”
He nodded.
As I stretched out self-consciously, I said, “I feel like I’m in some damn cartoon.”
“What cartoon?”
“Guy’s built like a bunch of grapes,” I said, looking at the ceiling. It was pale gray.
“What’s the caption?”
“‘I got trunks full of ’em.’”
“Very good,” he said quietly. I looked at him carefully. I knew then he was the kind of guy who laughs way down deep when he laughs at all.
He said, “I’ll use that in a book of case histories some time. But it won’t include yours. What made you throw that in?” When I didn’t answer, he got up and moved to a chair behind me where I couldn’t see him. “You can quit testing, Sonny. I’m good enough for your purposes.”
I clenched my jaw so hard, my back teeth hurt. Then I relaxed. I relaxed all over. It was wonderful. “All right,” I said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t say anything, but I had that feeling again that he was laughing. Not at me, though.
“How old are you?” he asked me suddenly.
“Uh—fifteen.”
“Uh—fifteen,” he repeated. “What does the ‘uh’ mean?”
“Nothing. I’m fifteen.”
“When I asked your age, you hesitated because some other number popped up. You discarded that and substituted ‘fifteen.’”
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