“You’re wrong, Mr. Fisher. Think a moment. Without hesitation, you will include the education of Martha Bagley along with the ‘care and affection’ you mentioned a moment ago.”
“Of course.”
“This means, Mr. Fisher, that Martha, approaching ten years old, represents a responsibility of about seven more years prior to her graduation from high school and another four years of college—granting that Martha is a standard, normal, healthy young lady. Am I right?”
“Sure.”
“Well, since you are happy and willing to take on the responsibility of eleven years of care and affection and the expense of schooling the girl, you might as well take advantage of the possibilities here and figure on five years—or less. If we cannot give her the equal of a master’s degree in three, I’m shooting in the dark. Make it five, and she’ll have her doctor’s degree—or at least it’s equivalent. Does that make sense?”
“Of course it does. But—”
“No buts until we’re finished. You’ll recall the tales we told you about the necessity of hiding out. It must continue. During the school year we must not be visible to the general public.”
“But dammit, I don’t want to set up my family in someone else’s house,” objected Tim Fisher.
“Buy this one,” suggested James. “Then it will be yours. I’ll stay on and pay rent on my section.”
“You’ll—now wait a minute! What are you talking about?”
“I said, ‘I’ll pay rent on my section,’” said James.
“But this guy upstairs—” Tim took a long breath. “Let’s get this straight,” he said, “now that we’re on the subject, what about Mr. Charles Maxwell?”
“I can best quote,” said James with a smile, “ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!’ ”
“That’s Shakespeare.”
“Sorry. That’s Sir Walter Scott. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto Six, Stanza Seventeen. The fact of the matter is that we could go on compounding this lie, but it’s time to stop it. Mr. Charles Maxwell does not exist.”
“I don’t understand!”
“Hasn’t it puzzled you that this hermit-type character that never puts a foot out of the house has been out and gone on some unstated vacation or business trip for most of the spring and summer?”
“Hadn’t given it a thought,” said Fisher with a fatuous look at Mrs. Bagley. She mooned back at him. For a moment they were lost in one another, giving proof to the idea that blinder than he who will not see is the fellow who has his eye on a woman.
“Charles Maxwell does not exist except in the minds of his happy readers,” said James. “He is a famous writer of boys’ stories and known to a lot of people for that talent. Yet he is no more a real person than Lewis Carroll.”
“But Lewis Carroll did exist—”
“As Charles L. Dodgson, a mathematician famous for his work in symbolic logic.”
“All right! Then who writes these stories? Who supports you—and this house?”
“I do!”
Tim blinked, looked around the room a bit wildly and then settled on Martha, looking at her helplessly.
“It’s true, Tim,” she said quietly. “It’s crazy but it works. I’ve been living with it for years.”
Tim considered that for a full minute. “All right,” he said shortly. “So it works. But why does any kid have to live for himself?” He eyed James. “Who’s responsible for you?”
“I am!”
“But—”
“Got an hour?” asked James with a smile. “Then listen—”
At the end of James Holden’s long explanation, Tim Fisher said, “Me—? Now, I need a drink!”
James chuckled, “Alcoholic, of course—which is Pi to seven decimal places if you ever need it. Just count the letters.”
Over his glass, Tim eyed James thoughtfully. “So if this is true, James, just who owns that fabulous machine of yours?”
“It is mine, or ours.”
“You gave me to believe that it was a high-priority Government project,” he said accusingly.
“Sorry. But I would lie as glibly to God Himself if it became necessary to protect myself by falsehood. I’m sorry it isn’t a Government project, but it’s just as important a secret.”
“Anything as big as this should be the business of the Government.”
“Perhaps so. But it’s mine to keep or to give, and it’s mine to study.” James was thoughtful for a moment. “I suppose that you can argue that anything as important as this should be handed over to the authorities immediately; that a large group of men dedicated to such a study can locate its difficulties and its pitfalls and failures far swifter than a single youth of eleven. Yet by the right of invention, a process protected by the Constitution of the United States and circumvented by some very odd rulings on the part of the Supreme Court, it is mine by inheritance, to reap the exclusive rewards for my family’s work. Until I’m of an age when I am deemed capable of managing my own life, I’d be ‘protected’ out of my rights if I handed this to anybody—including the Government. They’d start a commission full of bureaucrats who’d first use the machine to study how to best expand their own little empire, perpetuate themselves in office, and then they’d rule me out on the quaint theory that education is so important that it mustn’t be wasted on the young.”
Tim Fisher smiled wryly. He turned to Janet Bagley. “How do you want it?” he asked her.
“For Martha’s sake, I want it his way,” she said.
“All right. Then that’s the way we’ll have it,” said Tim Fisher. He eyed James somewhat ruefully. “You know, it’s a funny thing. I’ve always thought this was a screwy set-up, and to be honest, I’ve always thought you were a pretty bumptious kid. I guess you had a good reason. Anyway, I should have known Janet wouldn’t have played along with it unless she had a reason that was really helping somebody.”
James saw with relief that Tim had allied himself with the cause; he was, in fact, very glad to have someone knowledgeable and levelheaded in on the problem. Anyway he really liked Tim, and was happy to have the deception out of the way.
“That’s all right,” he said awkwardly.
Tim laughed. “Hey, will this contraption of yours teach me how to adjust a set of tappets?”
“No,” said James quickly. “It will teach you the theory of how to chop down a tree but it can’t show you how to swing an axe. Or,” he went on with a smile, “it will teach you how to be an efficient accountant—but you have to use your own money!”
* * *
In the house on Martin’s Hill, everybody won. Tim Fisher objected at first to the idea of gallivanting off on a protracted honeymoon, leaving a nine-year-old daughter in the care of a ten-year-old boy. But Janet—now Mrs. Fisher—pointed out that James and Martha were both quite competent, and furthermore there was little to be said for a honeymoon encumbered with a little pitcher that had such big ears, to say nothing of a pair of extremely curious eyes and a rather loud voice. And furthermore, if we allow the woman’s privilege of adding one furthermore on top of another, it had been a long, long time since Janet had enjoyed a child-free vacation. So she won. It was not Hawaii by air for a ten-day stay. It was Hawaii by ship with a sixty-day sojourn in a hotel that offered both seclusion and company to the guests’ immediate preference.
James Holden won more time. He felt that every hour was a victory. At times he despaired because time passed so crawlingly slow. All the wealth of his education could not diminish that odd sense of the time-factor that convinces all people that the length of the years diminish as age increases. Far from being a simple, amusing remark, the problem has been studied because it is universal. It is psychological, of course, and it is not hard to explain simply in terms of human experience plus the known fact that the human senses respond to the logarithm of the stimulus.
With most people, time is reasonably important. We live by the clock, and we die by the clock, and
before there were clocks there were candles marked in lengths and sand flowing through narrow orifices, water dripping into jars, and posts stuck in the ground with marks for the shadow to divide the day. The ancient ones related womanhood to the moon and understood that time was vital in the course of Life.
With James, time was more important, perhaps, than to any other human being alive. He was fighting for time, always. His was not the immature desire of uneducated youth to become adult overnight for vague reasons.
With James it was an honest evaluation of his precarious position. He had to hide until he was deemed capable of handling his own affairs, after which he could fight his own battles in his own way without the interference of the laws that are set up to protect the immature.
With Tim Fisher and his brand-new bride out of the way, James took a deep breath at having leaped one more hurdle. Then he sat down to think.
Obviously there is no great sea-change that takes place at the Stroke Of Midnight on the date of the person’s 21st birthday; no magic wand is waved over his scalp to convert him in a moment of time from a puling infant to a mature adult. The growth of child to adult is as gradual as the increase of his stature, which varies from one child to the next.
The fact remained that few people are confronted by the necessity of making a decision based upon the precise age of the subject. We usually cross this barrier with no trouble, taking on our rights and responsibilities as we find them necessary to our life. Only in probating an estate left by the demise of both parents in the presence of minor children does this legal matter of precise age become noticeable. Even then, the control exerted over the minor by the legal guardian diminishes by some obscure mathematical proportion that approaches zero as the minor approaches the legal age of maturity. Rare is the case of the reluctant guardian who jealously relinquishes the iron rule only after the proper litigation directs him to let go, render the accounting for audit, and turn over the keys to the treasury to the rightful heir.
James Holden was the seldom case. James Holden needed a very adroit lawyer to tell him how and when his rights and privileges as a citizen could be granted, and under what circumstances. From the evidence already at hand, James saw loopholes available in the matter of the legal age of twenty-one. But he also knew that he could not approach a lawyer with questions without giving full explanation of every why and wherefore.
So James Holden, already quite competent in the do-it-himself method of cutting his own ice, decided to study law. Without any forewarning of the monumental proportions of the task he faced, James started to acquire books on legal procedure and the law.
* * *
With the return of Tim and Janet Fisher matters progressed well. Mrs. Fisher took over the running of the household; Tim continued his running of the garage and started to dicker for the purchase of the house on Martin’s Hill. The “Hermit” who had returned before the wedding remained temporarily. With a long-drawn plan, Charles Maxwell would slowly fade out of sight. Already his absence during the summer was hinting as being a medical study; during the winter he would return to the distant hospital. Later he would leave completely cured to take up residence elsewhere. Beyond this they planned to play it by ear.
James and Martha, freed from the housework routine, went deep into study.
Christmas passed and spring came and in April, James marked his eleventh birthday.
* * *
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One important item continued to elude James Holden. The Educator could not be made to work in “tandem.” In less technical terms, the Educator was strictly an individual device, a one-man-dog. The wave forms that could be recorded were as individual as fingerprints and pore-patterns and iris markings. James could record a series of ideas or a few pages of information and play them back to himself. During the playback he could think in no other terms; he could not even correct, edit or improve the phrasing. It came back word for word with the faithful reproduction of absolute fidelity. Similarly, Martha could record a phase of information and she, too, underwent the same repetition when her recording was played back to her.
But if Martha’s recording were played through to James, utter confusion came. It was a whirling maze of colors and odors, sound, taste and touch.
It spoiled some of James Holden’s hopes; he sought the way to mass-use, his plan was to employ a teacher to digest the information and then via the Educator, impress the information upon many other brains each coupled to the machine. This would not work.
He made an extra headset late in June and they tried it, sitting side-by-side and still it did not work. With Martha doing the reading, she got the full benefit of the machine and James emerged with a whirling head full of riotous colors and other sensations. At one point he hoped that they might learn some subject by sitting side-by-side and reading the text in unison, but from this they received the information horribly mingled with equal intensity of sensory noise.
He did not abandon this hope completely. He merely put it aside as a problem that he was not ready to study yet. He would re-open the question when he knew more about the whole process. To know the whole process meant studying many fields of knowledge and combining them into a research of his own.
And so James entered the summer months as he’d entered them before; Tim and Janet Fisher took off one day and returned the next afternoon with a great gay show of “bringing the children home for the summer.”
Even in this day of multi-billion-dollar budgets and farm surpluses that cost forty thousand dollars per hour for warehouse rental, twenty-five hundred dollars is still a tidy sum to dangle before the eyes of any individual. This was the reward offered by Paul Brennan for any information as to the whereabouts of James Quincy Holden.
If Paul Brennan could have been honest, the information he could have supplied would have provided any of the better agencies with enough lead-material to track James Holden down in a time short enough to make the reward money worth the effort. Similarly, if James Holden’s competence had been no greater than Brennan’s scaled-down description, he could not have made his own way without being discovered.
Bound by his own guilt, Brennan could only fret. Everything including time, was running against him.
And as the years of James Holden’s independence looked toward the sixth, Paul Brennan was willing to make a mental bet that the young man’s education was deeper than ever.
He would have won. James was close to his dream of making his play for an appearance in court and pleading for the law to recognize his competence to act as an adult. He abandoned all pretense; he no longer hid through the winter months, and he did not keep Martha under cover either. They went shopping with Mrs. Fisher now and then, and if any of the folks in Shipmont wondered about them, the fact that the children were in the care and keeping of responsible adults and were oh-so-quick on the uptake stopped anybody who might have made a fast call to the truant officer.
Then in the spring of James Holden’s twelfth year and the sixth of his freedom, he said to Tim Fisher. “How would you like to collect twenty-five hundred dollars?”
Fisher grinned. “Who do you want killed?”
“Seriously.”
“Who wouldn’t?”
“All right, drop the word to Paul Brennan and collect the reward.”
“Can you protect yourself?”
“I can quote Gladstone from one end to the other. I can cite every civil suit regarding the majority or minority problem that has any importance. If I fail, I’ll skin out of there in a hurry on the next train. But I can’t wait forever.”
“What’s the gimmick, James?”
“First, I am sick and tired of running and hiding, and I think I’ve got enough to prove my point and establish my rights. Second, there is a bit of cupidity here; the reward money is being offered out of my own inheritance so I feel that I should have some say in where it should go. Third, the fact that I steer it into the hands of someone I’d prefer to get it tickles my sense
of humor. The trapper trapped; the bopper bopped; the sapper hoist by his own petard.”
“And—?”
“It isn’t fair to Martha, either. So the sooner we get this whole affair settled, the sooner we can start to move towards a reasonable way of life.”
“Okay, but how are we going to work it? I can’t very well turn up by myself, you know.”
“Why not?”
“People would think I’m a heel.”
“Let them think so. They’ll change their opinion once the whole truth is known.” James smiled. “It’ll also let you know who your true friends are.”
“Okay. Twenty-five hundred bucks and a chance at the last laugh sounds good. I’ll talk it over with Janet.”
That night they buried Charles Maxwell, the Hermit of Martin’s Hill.
* * *
BOOK THREE:
THE REBEL
* * *
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In his years of searching, Paul Brennan had followed eleven fruitless leads. It had cost him over thirteen hundred dollars and he was prepared to go on and on until he located James Holden, no matter how much it took. He fretted under two fears, one that James had indeed suffered a mishap, and the other that James might reveal his secret in a dramatic announcement, or be discovered by some force or agency that would place the whole process in hands that Paul Brennan could not reach.
The registered letter from Tim Fisher culminated this six years of frantic search. Unlike the previous leads, this spoke with authority, named names, gave dates, and outlined sketchily but adequately the operations of the young man in very plausible prose. Then the letter went on in the manner of a man with his foot in a cleft stick; the writer did not approve of James Holden’s operations since they involved his wife and newly-adopted daughter, but since wife and daughter were fond of James Holden, the writer could not make any overt move to rid his household of the interfering young man. Paul Brennan was asked to move with caution and in utter secrecy, even to sending the reward in cash to a special post-office box.
The Fourth 'R' (1959) Page 13
