The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (70 page)

"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 completed 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—F
_x
, F
₂
,
F
₃
; Ss, Bl.

"The dominants in capitals," he explained, "B
for black, and S for short hair; the recessives in small letters—s for Siamese,
1 for long hair. Wonderful to write 11 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
blue-prints 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 architect 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 siicnce 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. 1 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—he 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."