The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (69 page)

"Well—gosh! I wouldn't have come—" Tim was
stammering in confusion. "You ought to be paid. I take up so much of your
time. Maybe I'd better not come any more."

"I think you'd better. Don't you?"

"Why are you doing it for nothing, Dr. Welles?"

"I think you know why."

The boy sat down in the glider and pushed himself
meditatively back and forth. The glider squeaked.

"You're interested. You're curious," he said.

"That's not all, Tim."

Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.

"I know," said Timothy. "I believe it. Look,
is it all right if I call you Peter? Since we're friends."

At their next meeting, Timothy went into details about his
newspaper. He had kept all the copies, from the first smudged, awkwardly
printed pencil issues to the very latest neatly typed ones. But he would not
show Welles any of them.

"I just put down every day the things I most wanted to
say, the news or information or opinion I had to swallow unsaid. So it's a wild
medley. The earlier copies are awfully funny. Sometimes I guess what they were
all about, what made me write them. Sometimes I remember. I put down the books
I read too, and mark them like school grades, on two points—how I liked the
book, and whether it was good. And whether I had read it before, too."

"How many books do you read? What's your reading
speed?"

It proved that Timothy's reading speed on new books of adult
level varied from eight hundred to nine hundred fifty words a minute. The
average murder mystery—he loved them—took him a little less than an hour. A
year's homework in history, Tim performed easily by reading his textbook
through three or four times during the year. He apologized for that, but
explained that he had to know what was in the book so as not to reveal in
examinations too much that he had learned from other sources. Evenings, when
his grandparents believed him to be doing homework he spent his time reading
other books, or writing his newspaper, "or something." As Welles had
already guessed, Tim had read everything in his grandfather's library,
everything of interest in the public library that was not on the closed
shelves, and everything he could order from the state library.

"What do the librarians say?"

"They think the books are for my grandfather. I tell
them that, if they ask what a little boy wants with such a big book. Peter,
telling so many lies is what gets me down. I have to do it, don't I?"

"As far as I can see, you do," agreed Welles.
"But here's material for a while in my library. There'll have to be a
closed shelf here, too, though, Tim."

"Could you tell me why? I know about the library books.
Some of them might scare people, and some are—"

"Some of my books might scare you too, Tim. I'll tell
you a little about abnormal psychology if you like, one of these days, and then
I think you'll see that until you're actually trained to deal with such cases,
you'd be better off not knowing too much about them."

"I don't want to be morbid," agreed Tim. "All
right. I'll read only what you give me. And from now on I'll tell you things.
There was more than the newspaper, you know."

"I thought as much. Do you want to go on with your
tale?"

"It started when I first wrote a letter to a
newspaper—of course, under a pen name. They printed it. For a while I had a
high old time of it—a letter almost every day, using all sorts of pen names.
Then I branched out to magazines, letters to the editor again. And stories—I
tried stories."

He looked a little doubtfully at Welles, who said only:
"How old were you when you sold the first story?"

"Eight," said Timothy. "And when the check
came, with my name on it, 'T. Paul,' I didn't know what in the world to
do."

"That's a thought. What did you do?"

"There was a sign in the window of the bank. I always
read signs, and that one came back to my mind. 'Banking By Mail.' You can see I
was pretty desperate. So I got the name of a bank across the Bay and I wrote
them—on my typewriter—and said I wanted to start an account, and here was a
check to start it with. Oh, I was scared stiff, and had to keep saying to
myself that, after all, nobody could do much to me. It was my own money. But
you don't know what it's like to be only a small boy! They sent the check back
to me and I died ten deaths when I saw it. But the letter explained. I hadn't
endorsed it. They sent me a blank to fill out about myself. I didn't know how
many lies I dared to tell. But it was my money and I had to get it. If I could
get it into the bank, then some day I could get it out. I gave my business as
'author' and I gave my age as twenty-four. I thought that was awfully
old."

"I'd like to see the story. Do you have a copy of the
magazine around?"

"Yes," said Tim. "But nobody noticed it—I
mean, T. Paul' could be anybody. And when I saw magazines for writers on the
newsstands and bought them, I got on to the way to use a pen name on the story
and my own name and address up in the corner. Before that I used a pen name and
sometimes never got the things back or heard about them. Sometimes I did,
though."

"What then?"

"Oh, then I'd endorse the check payable to me and sign
the pen name, and then sign my own name under it. Was I scared to do that! But
it was my money."

"Only stories?"

"Articles, too. And things. That's enough of that for
today. Only— I just wanted to say—a while ago, T. Paul told the bank he wanted
to switch some of the money over to a checking account. To buy books by mail,
and such. So, I could pay you, Dr. Welles—" with sudden formality.

"No, Tim," said Peter Welles firmly. "The
pleasure is all mine. What I want is to see the story that was published when
you were eight. And some of the other things that made T. Paul rich enough to
keep a consulting psychiatrist on the payroll. And, for the love of Pete, will
you tell me how all this goes on without your grandparents' knowing a thing
about it?"

"Grandmother thinks I send in box tops and fill out
coupons," said Tim. "She doesn't bring in the mail. She says her
little boy gets such a big bang out of that little chore. Anyway that's what
she said when I was eight. I played mailman. And there were box tops—I showed
them to her, until she said, about the third time, that really she wasn't
greatly interested in such matters. By now she has the habit of waiting for me
to bring in the mail."

Peter Welles thought that was quite a day of revelation. He
spent a quiet evening at home, holding his head and groaning, trying to take it
all in.

And that I. Q.—120, nonsense! The boy had been holding out
on him. Tim's reading had obviously included enough about I. Q. tests, enough
puzzles and oddments in magazines and such, to enable him to stall
successfully. What could he do if he would co-operate?

Welles made up his mind to find out.

He didn't find out. Timothy Paul went swiftly through the
whole range of Superior Adult tests without a failure of any sort. There were no
tests yet devised that could measure his intelligence. While he was still
writing his age with one figure, Timothy Paul had faced alone, and solved alone,
problems that would have baffled the average adult. He had adjusted to the
hardest task of all—that of appearing to be a fairly normal, B-average small
boy.

And it must be that there was more to find out about him.
What did he write? And what did he do besides read and write, learn carpentry
and breed cats and magnificently fool his whole world?

When Peter Welles had read some of Tim's writings, he was
surprised to find that the stories the boy had written were vividly human, the
product of close observation of human nature. The articles, on the other hand,
were closely reasoned and showed thorough study and research. Apparently Tim
read every word of several newspapers and a score or more of periodicals.

"Oh, sure," said Tim, when questioned. "I
read everything. I go back once in a while and review old ones, too."

"If you can write like this," demanded Welles,
indicating a magazine in which a staid and scholarly article had appeared,
"and this" —this was a man-to-man political article giving the
arguments for and against a change in the whole Congressional system—"then
why do you always talk to me in the language of an ordinary stupid
schoolboy?"

"Because I'm only a boy," replied Timothy.
"What would happen if I went around talking like that?"

"You might risk it with me. You've showed me these
things."

"I'd never dare to risk talking like that. I might
forget and do it again before others. Besides, I can't pronounce half the
words."

"What!"

"I never look up a pronunciation," explained
Timothy. "In case I do slip and use a word beyond the average, I can
anyway hope I didn't say it right."

Welles shouted with laughter, but was sober again as he
realized the implications back of that thoughtfulness.

"You're just like an explorer living among
savages," said the psychiatrist. "You have studied the savages
carefully and tried to imitate them so they won't know there are
differences."

"Something like that," acknowledged Tim.

"That's why your stories are so human," said
Welles. "That one about the awful little girl—"

They both chuckled.

"Yes, that was my first story," said Tim. "I
was almost eight, and there was a boy in my class who had a brother, and the
boy next door was the other one, the one who was picked on."

"How much of the story was true?"

"The first part. I used to see, when I went over there,
how that girl picked on Bill's brother's friend, Steve. She wanted to play with
Steve all the time herself and whenever he had boys over, she'd do something
awful. And Steve's folks were like I said—they wouldn't let Steve do anything
to a girl. When she threw all the watermelon rinds over the fence into his
yard, he just had to pick them all up and say nothing back; and she'd laugh at
him over the fence. She got him blamed for things he never did, and when he had
work to do in the yard she'd hang out of her window and scream at him and make
fun. I thought first, what made her act like that, and then I made up a way for
him to get even with her, and wrote it out the way it might have
happened."

"Didn't you pass the idea on to Steve and let him try
it?"

"Gosh, no! I was only a little boy. Kids seven don't
give ideas to kids ten. That's the first thing I had to learn—to be always the
one that kept quiet, especially if there was any older boy or girl around, even
only a year or two older. I had to learn to look blank and let my mouth hang
open and say, 'I don't get it,' to almost everything."

"And Miss Page thought it was odd that you had no close
friends of your own age," said Welles. "You must be the loneliest boy
that ever walked this earth, Tim. You've lived in hiding like a criminal. But
tell me, what are you afraid of?"

"I'm afraid of being found out, of course. The only way
I can live in this world is in disguise—until I'm grown up, at any rate. At
first it was just my grandparents' scolding me and telling me not to show off,
and the way people laughed if I tried to talk to them. Then I saw how people
hate anyone who is better or brighter or luckier. Some people sort of trade
off; if you're bad at one thing you're good at another, but they'll forgive you
for being good at some things, if you're not good at others so they can balance
it off. They can beat you at something. You have to strike a balance. A child
has no chance at all. No grownup can stand it to have a child know anything he
doesn't. Oh, a little thing if it amuses them. But not much of anything.
There's an old story about a man who found himself in a country where everyone
else was blind. I'm like that—but they shan't put out my eyes. I'll never let
them know I can see anything."

"Do you see things that no grown person can see?"

Tim waved his hand towards the magazines.

"Only like that, I meant. I hear people talking in
street cars and stores, and while they work, and around. I read about the way
they act—in the news. I'm like them, just like them, only I seem about a
hundred years older—more matured."

"Do you mean that none of them have much sense?"

"I don't mean that exactly. I mean that so few of them
have any, or show it if they do have. They don't even seem to want to. They're
good people in their way, but what could they make of me? Even when I was
seven, I could understand their motives, but they couldn't understand their own
motives. And they're so lazy—they don't seem to want to know or to understand. When
I first went to the library for books, the books I learned from were seldom
touched by any of the grown people. But they were meant for ordinary grown
people. But the grown people didn't want to know things—they only wanted to
fool around. I feel about most people the way my grandmother feels about babies
and puppies. Only she doesn't have to pretend to be a puppy all the time,"
Tim added, with a little bitterness.

"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?