Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction

by Terry Carr

  “And their offspring?” inquired Welles, who could not see what all this had to do with the main question, but was willing to listen to anything that might lead to information.

  “Some of the kittens appear to be pure Persian, and others pure Siamese. These he insisted on keeping, although, as I have explained to him, it would be dishonest to sell them, since they are not purebred. A good many of the kittens are black shorthaired and these we destroy. But enough of cats, Dr. Welles. And I am afraid I am talking too much about my grandson.”

  “I can understand that you are very proud of him,” said Welles.

  “I must confess that we are. And he is a bright boy. When he and his grandfather talk together, and with me also, he asks very intelligent questions. We do not encourage him to voice his opinions—I detest the smart-Aleck type of small boy—and yet I believe they would be quite good opinions for a child of his age.”

  “Has his health always been good?” asked Welles.

  “On the whole, very good. I have taught him the value of exercise, play, wholesome food and suitable rest. He has had a few of the usual childish ailments, not seriously. And he never has colds. But, of course, he takes his cold shots twice a year when we do.”

  “Does he mind the shots?” asked Welles, as casually as he could.

  “Not at all. I always say that he, though so young, sets an example I find hard to follow. I still flinch, and really rather dread the ordeal.”

  Welles looked toward the door at a sudden, slight sound. Timothy stood there, and he had heard. Again, fear was stamped on his face and terror looked out of his eyes.

  “Timothy,” said his grandmother, “don’t stare.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the boy managed to say.

  “Are your papers all delivered? I did not realize we had been talking for an hour, Dr. Welles. Would you like to see Timothy’s cats?” Mrs. Davis inquired graciously. “Timothy, take Dr. Welles to see your pets. We have had quite a talk about them.”

  Welles got Tim out of the room as fast as he could. The boy led the way around the house and into the side yard where the former garage stood.

  There the man stopped.

  “Tim,” he said, “you don’t have to show me the cats if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, that’s all right.”

  “Is that part of what you are hiding? If it is, I don’t want to see it until you are ready to show me.”

  Tim looked up at him then.

  ‘Thanks,” he said. “I don’t mind about the cats. Not if you like cats really.”

  “I really do. But, Tim, this I would like to know: You’re not afraid of the needle. Could you tell me why you were afraid … why you said you were afraid … of my shot? The one I promised not to give you after all?” Their eyes met.

  “You won’t tell?” asked Tim.

  “I won’t tell.”

  “Because it was pentothal. Wasn’t it?”

  Welles gave himself a slight pinch. Yes, he was awake. Yes, this was a little boy asking him about pentothal. A boy who—yes, certainly, a boy who knew about it.

  “Yes, it was,” said Welles. “A very small dose. You know what it is?”

  “Yes, sir. I … I read about it somewhere. In the papers.”

  “Never mind that. You have a secret—something you want to hide. That’s what you are afraid about, isn’t it?” The boy nodded dumbly.

  “If it’s anything wrong, or that might be wrong, perhaps I could help you. You’ll want to know me better, first. You’ll want to be sure you can trust me. But I’ll be glad to help, any time you say the word, Tim. Or I might stumble on to things the way I did just now. One thing though, I never tell secrets.”

  “Never?”

  “Never. Doctors and priests don’t betray secrets. Doctors seldom, priests never. I guess I am more like a priest, because of the kind of doctoring I do.”

  He looked down at the boy’s bowed head.

  “Helping fellows who are scared sick,” said the psychiatrist very gently. “Helping fellows in trouble, getting things straight again, fixing things up, unsnarling tangles. When I can, that’s what I do. And I don’t tell anything to anybody. It’s just between that one fellow and me.” But, he added to himself, I’ll have to find out. I’ll have to find out what ails this child. Miss Page is right—he needs me. They went to see the cats.

  There were the Siamese in their cages, and the Persians in their cages, and there, in several small cages, the shorthaired black cats and their hybrid offspring. “We take them into the house, or let them into this big cage, for exercise,” explained Tim. “I take mine into my shop sometimes. These are all mine. Grandmother keeps hers on the sun porch.”

  “You’d never know these were not all purebred,” observed Welles. “Which did you say were the full Persians? Any of their kittens here?”

  “No; I sold them.”

  “I’d like to buy one. But these look just the same—it wouldn’t make any difference to me. I want a pet, and wouldn’t use it for breeding stock. Would you sell me one of these?”

  Timothy shook his head.

  “I’m sorry. I never sell any but the pure-breds.” It was then that Welles began to see what problem he faced. Very dimly he saw it, with joy, relief, hope and wild enthusiasm.

  “Why not?” urged Welles. “I can wait for a purebred, if you’d rather, but why not one of these? They look just the same. Perhaps they’d be more interesting.” Tim looked at Welles for a long, long minute.

  “I’ll show you,” he said. “Promise to wait here? No, I'll let you come into the workroom. Wait a minute, please.” The boy drew a key from under his blouse, where it had hung suspended from a chain, and unlocked the door of his shop. He went inside, closed the door, and Welles could hear him moving about for a few moments. Then he came to the door and beckoned.

  “Don’t tell grandmother,” said Tim. “I haven’t told her yet. If it lives, I’ll tell her next week.”

  In the corner of the shop under a table there was a box, and in the box there was a Siamese cat. When she saw a stranger she tried to hide her kittens; but Tim lifted her gently, and then Welles saw. Two of the kittens looked like little white rats with stringy tails and smudgy paws, ears and noses. But the third—yes, it was going to be a different sight. It was going to be a beautiful cat if it lived. It had long, silky white hair like the finest Persian, and the Siamese markings were showing up plainly.

  Welles caught his breath.

  “Congratulations, old man! Haven’t you told anyone yet?”

  “She’s not ready to show. She’s not a week old.”

  “But you’re going to show her?”

  “Oh, yes, grandmother will be thrilled. She’ll love her. Maybe there’ll be more.”

  “You knew this would happen. You made it happen. You planned it all from the start,” accused Welles.

  “Yes,” admitted the boy.

  “How did you know?” The boy turned away.

  “I read it somewhere,” said Tim.

  The cat jumped back into the box and began to nurse her babies. Welles felt as if he could endure no more. Without a glance at anything else in the room—and everything else was hidden under tarpaulins and newspapers—he went to the door.

  “Thanks for showing me, Tim,” he said. “And when you have any to sell, remember me. I’ll wait. I want one like that.”

  The boy followed him out and locked the door carefully.

  “But Tim,” said the psychiatrist, “that’s not what you were afraid I’d find out. I wouldn’t need a drug to get you to tell me this, would I?”

  Tim replied carefully, “I didn’t want to tell this until I was ready. Grandmother really ought to know first. But you made me tell you.”

  “Tim,” said Peter Welles earnestly, “I’ll see you again. Whatever you are afraid of, don’t be afraid of me. I often guess secrets. I’m on the way to guessing yours already. But nobody else need ever know.”

  He walked rapidly home, whistl
ing to himself from time to time. Perhaps he, Peter Welles, was the luckiest man in the world.

  He had scarcely begun to talk to Timothy on the boy’s next appearance at the office, when the phone in the hall rang. On his return, when he opened the door he saw a book in Tim’s hands. The boy made a move as if to hide it, and thought better of it.

  Welles took the book and looked at it.

  “Want to know more about Rorschach, eh?” he asked.

  “I saw it on the shelf. I—”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Welles, who had purposely left the book near the chair Tim would occupy. “But what’s the matter with the library?”

  “They’ve got some books about it, but they’re on the closed shelves. I couldn’t get them.” Tim spoke without thinking first, and then caught his breath.

  But Welles replied calmly: “I’ll get it out for you. I'll have it next time you come. Take this one along today when you go. Tim, I mean it—you can trust me.”

  “I can’t tell you anything,” said the boy. “You’ve found out some things. I wish … oh, I don’t know what I wish! But I’d rather be let alone. I don’t need help. Maybe I never will. If I do, can’t I come to you then?” Welles pulled out his chair and sat down slowly.

  “Perhaps that would be the best way, Tim. But why wait for the ax to fall? I might be able to help you ward it off what you’re afraid of. You can kid people along about the cats; tell them you were fooling around to see what would happen. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, they tell me. Maybe with me to help, you could. Or with me to back you up, the blowup would be easier. Easier on your grandparents, too.”

  “I haven’t done anything wrong!”

  “I’m beginning to be sure of that. But things you try to keep hidden may come to light. The kitten—you could hide it, but you don’t want to. You’ve got to risk something to show it.”

  “I’ll tell them I read it somewhere.”

  “That wasn’t true, then. I thought not. You figured it out.” There was silence.

  Then Timothy Paul said: “Yes, I figured it out. But that’s my secret.”

  “It’s safe with me.”

  But the boy did not trust him yet. Welles soon learned that he had been tested. Tim took the book home, and returned it, took the library books which Welles got for him, and in due course returned them also. But he talked little and was still wary. Welles could talk all he liked, but he got little or nothing out of Tim. Tim had told all he was going to tell. He would talk about nothing except what any boy would talk about.

  After two months of this, during which Welles saw Tim officially once a week and unofficially several times—showing up at the school playground to watch games, or meeting Tim on the paper route and treating him to a soda after it was finished. Welles had learned very little more. He tried again. He had probed no more during the two months, respected the boy’s silence, trying to give him time to get to know and trust him.

  But one day he asked: “What are you going to do when you grow up, Tim? Breed cats?”

  Tim laughed a denial.

  “I don’t know what, yet. Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes another.”

  This was a typical boy answer. Welles disregarded it.

  “What would you like to do best of all?” he asked. Tim leaned forward eagerly. “What you do!” he cried.

  “You’ve been reading up on it, I suppose,” said Welles, as casually as he could, “Then you know, perhaps, that before anyone can do what I do, he must go through it himself, like a patient. He must also study medicine and be a full-fledged doctor, of course. You can’t do that yet. But you can have the works now, like a patient.”

  “Why? For the experience?”

  “Yes. And for the cure. You’ll have to face that fear and lick it. You’ll have to straighten out a lot of other things, or at least face them.”

  “My fear will be gone when I’m grown up,” said Timothy. “I think it will. I hope it will.”

  “Can you be sure?”

  “No,” admitted the boy. “I don’t know exactly why I’m afraid. I just know I must hide things. Is that bad, too?”

  “Dangerous, perhaps.” Timothy thought a while in silence. Welles smoked three cigarettes and yearned to pace the floor, but dared not move.

  “What would it be like?” asked Tim finally.

  “You’d tell me about yourself. What you remember. Your childhood—the way your grandmother runs on when she talks about you.”

  “She sent me out of the room. I’m not supposed to think I’m bright,” said Tim, with one of his rare grins.

  “And you’re not supposed to know how well she reared you?”

  “She did fine,” said Tim. “She taught me all the wisest things I ever knew.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as shutting up. Not telling all you know. Not showing off.”

  “I see what you mean,” said Welles. “Have you heard the story of St. Thomas Aquinas?”

  “No.”

  “When he was a student in Paris, he never spoke out in class, and the others thought him stupid. One of them kindly offered to help him, and went over all the work very patiently to make him understand it. And then one day they came to a place where the other student got all mixed up and had to admit he didn’t understand. Then Thomas suggested a solution and it was the right one. He knew more than any of the others all the time; but they called him the Dumb Ox.”

  Tim nodded gravely.

  “And when he grew up?” asked the boy.

  “He was the greatest thinker of all time,” said Welles.

  “A fourteenth-century super-brain. He did more original work than any other ten great men; and he died young.” After that, it was easier.

  “How do I begin?” asked Timothy.

  “You’d better begin at the beginning. Tell me all you can remember about your early childhood, before you went to school.”

  Tim gave this his consideration.

  “I’ll have to go forward and backward a lot,” he said.

  “I couldn’t put it all in order.”

  “That’s all right. Just tell me today all you can remember about that time of your life. By next week you’ll have remembered more. As we go on to later periods of your life, you may remember things that belonged to an earlier time; tell them then. We’ll make some sort of order out of it.”

  Welles listened to the boy’s revelations with growing excitement. He found it difficult to keep outwardly calm.

  “When did you begin to read?” Welles asked.

  “I don’t know when it was. My grandmother read me some stories, and somehow I got the idea about the words. But when I tried to tell her I could read, she spanked me. She kept saying I couldn’t, and I kept saying I could, until she spanked me. For a while I had a dreadful time, because I didn’t know any word she hadn’t read to me. I guess I sat beside her and watched, or else I remembered and then went over it by myself right after. I must have learned as soon as I got the idea that each group of letters on the page was a word.”

  ‘The word-unit method,” Welles commented. “Most self-taught readers learned like that.”

  “Yes. I have read about it since. And Macaulay could read when he was three, but only upside-down, because of standing opposite when his father read the Bible to the family.”

  “There are many cases of children who learned to read as you did, and surprised their parents. Well? How did you get on?”

  “One day I noticed that two words looked almost alike and sounded almost alike. They were ‘can’ and ‘man.’ I remember staring at them and then it was like something beautiful boiling up in me. I began to look carefully at the words, but in a crazy excitement. I was a long while at it, because when I put down the book and tried to stand up I was stiff all over. But I had the idea, and after that it wasn’t hard to figure out almost any words. The really hard words are the common ones that you get all the time in easy books. Other words are pro
nounced the way they are spelled.”

  “And nobody knew you could read?”

  “No. Grandmother told me not to say I could, so I didn’t. She read to me often, and that helped. We had a great many books, of course. I liked those with pictures. Once or twice they caught me with a book that had no pictures, and then they’d take it away and say, I’ll find a book for a little boy.’ ”

  “Do you remember what books you liked then?”

  “Books about animals, I remember. And geographies. It was funny about animals—”

  Once you got Timothy started, thought Welles, it wasn’t hard to get him to go on talking,

  “One day I was at the Zoo,” said Tim, “and by the cages alone. Grandmother was resting on a bench and she let me walk along by myself. People were talking about the animals and I began to tell them all I knew. It must have been funny in a way, because I had read a lot of words I couldn’t pronounce correctly, words I had never heard spoken. They listened and asked me questions and I thought I was just like grandfather, teaching them the way he sometimes taught me. And then they called another man to come, and said, ‘Listen to this kid; he’s a scream!’ and I saw they were all laughing at me.”

  Timothy’s face was redder than usual, but he tried to smile as he added, “I can see now how it must have sounded funny. And unexpected, too; that’s a big point in humor. But my little feelings were so dreadfully hurt that I ran back to my grandmother crying, and she couldn’t find out why. But it served me right for disobeying her. She always told me not to tell people things; she said a child had nothing to teach its elders.”

  “Not in that way, perhaps—at that age.”

  “But, honestly, some grown people don’t know very much,” said Tim. “When we went on the train last year, a woman came up and sat beside me and started to tell me things a little boy should know about California. I told her I’d lived here all my life, but I guess she didn’t even know we are taught things in school, and she tried to tell me things, and almost everything was wrong.”