Science Fiction for People Who Hate Science Fiction

by Terry Carr

  “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, and 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 morning I 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 symbols—Fi, 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.”

  He closed the book in triumph.

  “Now,” and he marched to the covered thing on the table,

  “My latest big secret,” Tim lifted the cloth carefully and displayed a beautifully built doll house. No, a model house—Welles corrected himself swiftly. A beautiful model, and—yes, built to scale.

  “The roof comes off. See, it has a big storage room and a room for a play room or a maid or something. Then I lift off the attic”

  “Good heavens!” cried Peter Welles. “Any little girl would give her soul for this!”

  “I used fancy wrapping papers for the wallpapers. I wove the rugs on a little hand loom,” gloated Timothy. “The furniture’s just like real, isn’t it? Some I bought; that’s plastic. Some I made of construction paper and things. The curtains were the hardest; but I couldn’t ask grandmother to sew them—”

  “Why not?” the amazed doctor managed to ask.

  “She might recognize this afterwards,” said Tim, and he lifted off the upstairs floor.

  “Recognize it? You haven’t showed it to her? Then when would she see it?”

  “She might not,” admitted Tim. “But I don’t like to take some risks.”

  “That’s a very livable floor plan you’ve used,” said Welles, bending closer to examine the house in detail.

  “Yes, I thought so. It’s awful how many house plans leave no clear wall space for books or pictures. Some of them have doors placed so you have to detour around the dining room table every time you go from the living room to the kitchen, or so that a whole corner of a room is good for nothing, with doors at all angles. Now, I designed this house to—”

  “You designed it, Tim!”

  “Why, sure. Oh, I see—you thought I built it from blueprints I’d bought. My first model home, I did, but the architecture courses gave me so many ideas that I wanted to see how they would look. Now, the cellar and game room...”

  Welles came to himself an hour later, and gasped when he looked at his watch.

  “It’s too late. My patient has gone home again by this time. I may as well stay—how about the paper route?”

  “I gave that up. Grandmother offered to feed the cats as soon as I gave her the kitten. And I wanted the time for this. Here are the pictures of the house.”

  The color prints were very good.

  “I’m sending them and an article to the magazines,” said Tim. “This time I’m T. L. Paul. Sometimes I used to pretend all the different people I am were talking together—but now I talk to you instead, Peter.”

  “Will it bother the cats if I smoke? Thanks. Nothing I’m likely to set on fire, I hope? Put the house together and let me sit here and look at it. I want to look in through the windows. Put its lights on. There.”

  The young architec
t beamed, and snapped on the little lights.

  “Nobody can see in here. I got Venetian blinds; and when I work in here, I even shut them sometimes.”

  “If I’m to know all about you, I’ll have to go through the alphabet from A to Z,” said Peter Welles. “This is Architecture. What else in the A’s?”

  “Astronomy. I showed you those articles. My calculations proved correct. Astrophysics. I got A in the course, but haven’t done anything original so far. Art, no. I can’t paint or draw very well, except mechanical drawing. I’ve done all the Merit Badge work in scouting, all through the alphabet.”

  “Darned if I can see you as a Boy Scout,” protested Welles.

  “I’m a very good Scout. I have almost as many badges as any other boy my age in the troop. And at camp I do as well as most city boys.”

  “Do you do a good turn every day?”

  “Yes,” said Timothy. “Started that when I first read about Scouting. I was a Scout at heart before I was old enough to be a Cub. You know. Peter, when you’re very young, you take all that seriously about the good deed every day, and the good habits and ideals and all that. And then you get older and it begins to seem funny and childish and posed and artificial, and you smile in a superior way and make jokes. But there is a third step, too, when you take it all seriously again. People who make fun of the Scout Law are doing the boys a lot of harm; but those who believe in things like that don’t know how to say so, without sounding priggish and platitudinous. I’m going to do an article on it before long.”

  “Is the Scout Law your religion—if I may put it that way?”

  “No,” said Timothy. “But ‘a Scout is Reverent.’ Once I tried to study the churches and find out what was the truth. I wrote letters to pastors of all denominations—all those in the phone book and the newspaper—when I was on a vacation in the East, I got the names, and then wrote after I got back. I couldn’t write to people here in the city. I said I wanted to know which church was true, and expected them to write to me and tell me about theirs, and argue with me, you know. I could read library books, and all they had to do was recommend some, I told them, and then correspond with me a little about them.”

  “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 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 how I 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 fairytale 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 expressed 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 e
vening. 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.”