The Non-Statistical Man Page 12

  There was something missing. A piece he didn’t see.

  He thought of Mac, and knew what Mac would do. Mac was a geologist; he couldn’t let the stones alone. Even now he carried one in the pocket of his spacesuit. Mac would try to take them to Earth, Joe thought. He would scoff at Harcourt’s warning and surround himself with so-called precautions.

  But the stones would get loose. They couldn’t be allowed to reach Earth ever.

  Joe glanced at the dial in the helmet. Fourteen minutes since they had reported to Ormsby; deadline for the next report was six minutes away. What could he do? What could anyone do, he thought in agony, to assure that the stones would never be taken to Earth?

  There had been some plan in Harcourt’s mind; Joe was sure of it. He couldn’t get the missing piece to fit. The engine room. The sack of stones.

  But Harcourt had died. The siege in the control room had cost him too much time, and he couldn’t carry out whatever plan he had. Yet what plan could possibly exist for making sure the time-magnets would never menace earth?

  Joe felt a desperate, choking sensation rise in his throat as he looked again upon the skeleton of Harcourt and heard the distant sound of Mac’s moving up through the ship. He guessed that, th,e geologist had tried to contact him by radio, which had been disconnected when he removed his own helmet. .

  It didn’t matter. He and Mac had nothing to say to each other. Soon, they would have nothing to say to anyone, ever.

  Motion.

  Motion or life, Harcourt had said. These would discharge the time-magnets as a flame would destroy a steel magnet. Enough motion would draw out all the time field and disperse it—

  Suddenly, Joe saw it; he knew what Harcourt’s desperate plan had been. He knew how it was possible to free the Earth from the menace that had circled it through the eons in its own satellite.

  Mac’s steps were loud on the circular stairway now. Joe glanced at the time. Three minutes. There was no time to argue with Mac, to explain to him, to try to convince him. And in the end, he would probably never be convinced.

  Joe picked up the sub-machine gun that Harcourt had used. He sat with it in his lap waiting as Mac’s footsteps sounded in the ship. The geologist reached the top of the stairway and lumbered impatiently toward the control room. Joe met him as he came in from the corridor.

  The machine-gun made a ragged thunder within the metal room. And then it seemed infinitely quiet as Mac crumpled to the floor; blood streaming through his shattered helmet.

  Wearily, Joe put the gun down and gathered the sack of stones that had lain at Harcourt’s feet. Stepping over Mack’s body, he dragged the sack down the corridor and began the descent of the spiral stairway. Ormsby would even now be giving orders for another rocket-jumper to leave the station. But it would take a full twelve minutes lor the ship to make a landing. He should be able to make it.

  It took him eight of those minutes to get the sack to the engine room. It must have been a terrific feat, he thought, for Harcourt to get them to the control room in the first place. It must have been necessary to protect them while fighting off the crewmen in the lower levels.

  At last Joe reached his objective and permitted himself a moment’s rest. He stood on the engineers’ catwalk overlooking the massive reactor which provided power for the ship.

  Motion, he thought again. There was motion in its ultimate state. Or would be—with the sudden influx of accelerated time-field. Not merely a fraction of a percent of the fissionable material would contribute to the blast; probably close to one hundred percent of the mass would explode at once. In that terrific blast, every time-magnet on the Moon should discharge its field. He wondered just what would happen to the Moon itself. If it contained a percentage of native radioactive materials—

  Suddenly Joe felt himself trembling. A weakness was creeping through his limbs. He glanced at his own hands, shocked by what he saw. The skin was withered, and dry, and half-transparent—like the flesh of an old, old man.

  He understood. The terrific field from the bag of stones was discharging through him. He laughed a little hysterically as he realized he was dying now of old age. He had never supposed that a spaceman would live so long!

  And then he hurled the bag of time-magnets with all his feeble, waning strength. He watched it tumble straight down upon the ship’s reactor.

  On earth the explosion was observed. It awoke the sleeping inhabitants of a hemisphere and sent hysterical masses screaming to their cathedrals.

  The observatories were shaken with the fury of the inquiries, but they had no answer nor any explanation for die disaster which shattered the Moon and destroyed the space station circling near it.

  And shortly they knew that they would never have an explanation; for that was the night when the Moon turned to blood and hung in the sky, a crimson glowing reminder now that man would never set foot upon the half-molten surface of his satellite.

  THE GARDENER

  Jimmy Correll hated the smell of schools. The papery smell of worn books, the smell of chalk dust and teachers’ perfumes and the oily sweeping compound Mr. Barton brushed over the wooden floors each night. The choking smell of too many sweaty jeans crowded together on these hot, spring days.

  This odor of learning flowed through the halls of Westwood High and pooled in the big auditorium wing that would soon be filling for the Friday Assembly. Mr. Barton was already opening the high windows against it. Jimmy put his head through the partly open doorway and watched the custodian’s angular form moving along the wall.

  Mr. Barton knew the scores of all the games Westwood had played since he came there in ’31. He punched the boys on the biceps, and roared loudly when he won over them in arguments as to who beat whom in which year. Except that he never punched Jimmy’s arm. He spoke softly and tousled Jimmy’s hair. Sometimes Jimmy thought Mr. Barton was the only friend he had—besides Brick Malloy, of course.

  He backed from the door and closed it quietly. He wished he could call out and tell Mr. Barton what he was doing, but no one must see him now.

  A bell shrilled. The five-minute, between-class period was over. Jimmy raced to the end of the hall and slipped out to the bike rack. He unlocked his own bicycle quickly and sped away from the school yard.

  He didn’t stop his frantic pumping until he reached the bridge across Willow Creek, nearly two miles from Westwood High. His breath coming in deep gasps, he got off and walked his bike down the steep slope to a hiding place under the bridge. Then he moved along the bank on which the spring grass was already high, half hiding the old trails. At last he stopped, a half mile from the bridge, under the great, shadowy arms of a willow tree. The grass was shorter here in the shade. Jimmy dropped face down to its green softness.

  For a long time he didn’t move. He was safe. He knew it couldn’t last, but that didn’t matter. He was safe for today—Jimmy Correll Day at Westwood High. It would be all over before they found him.

  Inside, he felt like crying, but it wouldn’t come. Jimmy Correll Day! They called it his day and gave him an assembly to honor him. And the whole school despised him —all but Mr. Barton and Brick Malloy.

  In panic, he thought of sitting up there on the stage while Mr. Mooremeister, the Principal, said fine, flowery things he didn’t mean. He thought, too, of what his disappearance would do to his mother and father, who were going to sit on the stage with him. But he couldn’t help it; they expected too much.

  He moved over to the edge of the creek and watched the deep, clear water slide past the bank. This was the spot where Brick had taught him how to fish. Maybe he shouldn’t have come here. If they should ask Brick— But they wouldn’t get around to that until it was much too late. A couple of hours was all he needed.

  He took off his shoes and socks and let his feet hang in the cool water. He wished he could make them understand that this was where he belonged, with the Earth and the water and the wild growth along the banks of the stream.

  Maybe if they let him alo
ne he could have found a place for himself at school, too, but they wouldn’t let him alone. He was in the first grade a week when they promoted him to third. He stayed there a month. After that, he wasn’t considered as belonging to any particular grade. He just moved from room to room, soaking up everything the books and teachers had to show him.

  Now—next Fall—they wanted him to go to the University.

  He had won a four-year scholarship from the Martin-dale Electric Company in their annual Junior Scientist Contest. He had submitted his astronomy project and written an essay on Space, the Next Frontier. The judges said it was the best thing they had seen since the contest began.

  He hadn’t dreamed it might mean that they wouldn’t even let him finish high school. But Mr. Dunlap, of the Martindale Company, wanted him in the University next Fall. Dr. Webber, President of the University, wanted him also. Dr. Webber had kept an eye on him since the first reports of his genius started coming out of Lincoln grade school.

  And Mr. Mooremeister wanted it. Mr. Mooremeister, most of all. He’d be tickled to death to be rid of me, Jimmy thought.

  The memory of his first meeting with the Principal was like a hard lump inside Jimmy. It was on the day Mr. Gibbons, Principal of Lincoln, brought Jimmy to Westwood. He was left in the little anteroom while the two men talked. The partition was thick, but that made no difference. Jimmy didn’t need to hear their words to know everything that was in their minds.

  He hadn’t been able to do it very long at that time, and it still frightened him a little. It was one of the things he’d never told anyone about. He couldn’t make it work always, either, but now this ability was functioning perfectly. It was as if he were right inside the skulls of the two men.

  Mr. Mooremeister groaned in misery when Mr. Gibbons explained why he had come. “Not a cute little boy genius, Gibbons!” he cried. “Anything but that! Our football team hasn’t a single decent quarterback; our English staff is going to pieces. And you want me to wet nurse a little genius!

  “Send him down to Smithers at Central. Smithers likes wonder boys who can sit motionless for a day at a time and recite all of ‘Hamlet’ from memory.”

  “You’ve got to take him,” Mr. Gibbons said. “He knows more than half my teachers do. He’s in your district; and Webber at the University has an eye on him.”

  “Then let Webber take him! I don’t want him!”

  “That’ll come in a year or two. But he doesn’t think Jimmy is old enough for University environment right now.”

  “Not at nine, but at ten or eleven he will be,” said Mr. Mooremeister sarcastically.

  “Yes.” Then Mr. Gibbons was silent for quite a while before he said slowly, “Jimmy’s a queer little cuss. You can’t get close enough to really know him, but somehow I think he’s going to become a very great man. It may turn out that the most valuable thing you or I can do in our otherwise not-very-useful lives is to see that the thing Jimmy has inside him is not smothered before it matures.”

  Jimmy couldn’t remember when he first heard the word, prodigy. It was certainly long before his school days, but he hadn’t been concerned with its meaning then. He didn’t suppose he was different from other children.

  Now he wondered if he had any chance at all to ever be like them.

  He remembered the precise moment he found out there was a difference.

  In the first grade, Miss Brown printed “run” on the blackboard that first day of school. She took three ridiculous steps to show its meaning. And in midmorning then, Jimmy rose and solemnly announced: “But I already know how to read. I’ve always been able to read.”

  He began a recital of the long list of classics, science texts, and Donald Duck comics through which he’d gone with the patient help and guidance of his father. In the midst of it he stopped. Something like a cold wind swept about his feet; Miss Brown and the children were looking at him, utterly silent.

  Instinctively, he understood what he had done. He was a strange one in their midst, an outsider; and they hated him for it.

  That was what he felt swirling coldly in that room, he knew forever after. The dark penalty of hate for one who was different. He cried in the night when he got to bed. He cried for the immense, nameless ache that had opened up within him.

  His mother rocked him in her arms, and his father said it must have been the excitement of the first day at school. They tried to persuade him to tell what was the matter. But he had no words for it.

  He stood at the mouth of the great, empty cavern of his life and saw all the dark, lonely years stretching away into timelessness. But he had not the words for it, then or ever.

  He could not remember the beginning of wonder, of his great yearning inquiry about the stars and the Earth, the water and the air, and the things that crawled and swam and flew. It was a magic place, this world to which he had come!

  And he had always, from the moment of his birth, been able to know everything he wanted to know about it for little more than the asking. Truly, he could not remember learning to read. At the first glimpse of a printed page he had known. But after that first day of school he never told them, not even his parents, about the things he could do that other boys could not do at all.

  He remembered the first time in science class, for instance, when he had been shown a microscope along with the rest of the pupils. It had seemed such a useless object! By narrowing his vision a bit he could see clearly the wriggly amoeba in the little drop of water. But by then he understood he was .the only one in the class who could.

  He knew they didn’t understand about the stars, either. He read in his books about great telescopes that men built to stretch their puny vision to the threshold of space. But since infancy—he couldn’t recall the first time—he had strolled in vision across the stifling red sands of Mars. He had picked his way among the ancient ruins and played hide and seek in imagination with the small, brown cubs that scurried there, the only remnants of the proud, fallen race that had built those ruins.

  He knew he was the only one who could do these things. And he despised himself for it, for what was the use of such gifts if they shut him in a sealed tomb that kept him out of the life and friendship of his own kind?

  So, carefully, he hid all his strange, wild talents as best he could. But he could not hold himself to the pace of his fellow school pupils by any means at his command. It was impossible to camouflage himself as a common dullard.

  He knew he wasn’t normal. Sometimes he wondered if he was even human .. .

  In that first year of school, Miss Brown spread the word, and Mr. Gibbons came to see Jimmy’s genius for himself. They sent him on, out of the first grade, and that’s the way it began.

  He became a kind of celebrated freak, but only Mr. Gibbons showed any genuine liking for him. Other teachers never did. His fellow pupils regarded him with a kind of curious contempt. Jimmy had hoped it would turn out differently when he got to know them. But it took him such a long time to get acquainted, and he was shunted to a new group before he had time to know the last one.

  As the gap in ages widened, he gave it up. He never had a classmate for a friend. Not until Brick Malloy.

  In the archives of the University there was a bound, typewritten manuscript, a full inch and half thick, devoted to a description and analysis of Jimmy Correll. It had earned its author, Ralph Grosset, a master’s degree in psychology and had given Jimmy a whole summer with someone to talk to.

  Ralph Grosset had described in detail Jimmy’s photographic memory and his adult capacity for deductive reasoning, but he had skipped the things Jimmy tried to say about the wonder and the mystery of the universe, and of hating and the loneliness. He didn’t know about these things. He was interested only in preparing a thesis for his degree, and he didn’t really like Jimmy. Grosset feared him a little, almost, and distrusted him.

  Jimmy didn’t really expect anything different. He had given up long ago and learned to give coldness for coldness, retreating farther an
d farther into the clean little world of his own making. But it was lonely there.

  It was so lonely that he could stand it no longer.

  He drew his legs out of the chill water of the Creek and stretched them in a spot of sunlight filtering through the tree. He lay on his back staring upward at the sky through the net of willows. He was sure of one thing: He wasn’t going to the University next Fall.

  He knew what it would be like there. They would laugh when he first came into class and tell him the kindergarten was three doors down the hall. The professors would make a joke of his presence even while trying to reassure him it was normal for eleven year old boys to appear in their lecture rooms. They wouldn’t like him.

  And all of them would talk over his head about the ordinary affairs of life, the football games, the dances and the parties, the world he didn’t belong in. They would look through him and around him as if to rid themselves of his presence by sheer disbelief in him.

  That’s the way it had been at Westwood. He had been afraid, and the rest knew it instantly and without mercy. They called him “Professor” and “Four-Eyes” until he wanted to scream in rage.

  He hated the gym periods most of all. The white, suffocating steaminess of the dressing room made him gasp and go sick with nausea. He hated the smell of sweat and clothes and dirty shoes. The wild, dark hairiness of the surrounding bodies frightened him and made him ashamed of his own baby nakedness.

  And the others were ashamed to have him in their midst. Sometimes they kidded brutally about his little white skinny body, but mostly they just pretended he wasn’t there. On the field, of course, when sides were chosen for baseball or soccer, he was automatically the last one left. Nobody ever really chose him. When all the others had been picked and the crowd ran for positions, Jimmy would trail along with the side due to get the last man. .

  But in the early Fall .of this year the miracle had happened. Jimmy found a friend. Old Mr. Barton was his friend, of course, but Mr. Barton was everybody’s friend. It was different with Brick Malloy. Brick was a classmate. Captain of the football team.