The Short Life Part 4

"Maybe a sort of--mental trick?"

"Mental a.s.sociation rings a bell. Mental ... no, it's gone ... wait.

Teacher, trainer, instructor--a brain of limited intelligence would need a teacher. Gentle teacher. Why gentle, for Pete's sake? But teacher and pupil, that seems almost right. How much can one word mean? What am I trying to recall, anyway? The meaning of a word? The _a.s.sociations_ connected with a word? The a.s.sociation of ideas? Blast it, this is more than tantalizing."

"Like when you wake up knowing you've had a dream, but you can't remember any of it?"

"Uh ... yes, like a dream. A dream of--" The blood drained from his face, leaving him gray and ashen. Timmy put out a hand in alarm, to steady the wheel.

"Uncle Phil!"

"It's all right, Tim. It ... it's all right. I had a thought there that kind of shook me." He relaxed with a shaky laugh, relief flooding his face once more with color. "What a crazy thought! I could have sworn ...

well, never mind. But it shakes a man to learn what tricks his own mind can play on him, all in an instant."

"What kind of tricks, Uncle Phil?"

"Oh, no you don't. If you hadn't egged me on with so many questions, I'd have been spared a pretty nasty moment, you know that? Now let me concentrate on driving for a change so I can get you home in time for supper. O. K.?"

"But ... oh, O.K."

"Don't sound so disappointed, chum. It's been a pleasant drive, even if nothing much happened."

"Yes, Uncle Phil. Even if ... nothing much happened."

Spring changed to summer, and summer rolled into its final days. Phil was in a gloomy frame of mind when Timmy's eleventh birthday came around.

He watched Timmy draw a deep breath and--without puffing out his cheeks as a child would do--neatly blow out the eleven candles on his cake.

It was an efficient, sprayless, perfectly-controlled operation, an operation carried out happily and in high spirits, and it depressed Phil. The "party" itself depressed him--a child's birthday party with no children present, unless you counted Timmy! Phil and Doc, Helen and Jerry, and Homer, the latter gray muzzled and stiff in the joints. That was the roster of the guests and it could almost be called the roster of Timmy's total acquaintances. His parents, his two friends, and a dog that at its best had never seemed bright and now was obviously half-dead with age. The boy was not normal, had no normal life, and gave no indication of ever being likely to take a normal role in life. He was a "disordered personality" if one could take comfort in a tag, but the true nature, cause and cure of his divergence from "normal" would remain unknown so long as his parents were afraid of tampering--

"Did you make a wish, Timmy?"

"Sure, Mom."

"Helen, honey--Tim knows that wis.h.i.+ng when you blow out the candles is kid stuff."

"And what is he but an eleven-year-old kid?"

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"He's too smart to believe in wis.h.i.+ng, honey. Smarter than his old man, eh, Tim?"

"I'll _never_ be as smart as you, Dad."

"That's my boy! But you don't kid me." Jerry turned to Phil and Clancey, feigning indignation. "You know what happened the other day? I brought home an old design that I dug out of the files and wanted to look over--a helical gravity conveyer--and when Tim saw it spread out on the table he said, 'That's the curve I was just reading about.' Now how did that little so-and-so know enough to call it a curve? I figured he was bluffing and got him to show me where he read about it, and the brat showed me all right--in one of my old college textbooks! Of course I only had to ask a few questions to find out that the college texts are far beyond him, but imagine him dipping into them on his own and getting anything out of them at all! How about that, young man? Explain yourself."

Timmy hesitated, his eyes dark with uncertainty.

"You said I could," he blurted defensively. "Remember? Remember I asked you one day and you said--"

"Your father isn't angry, Timmy," Helen laughed, hugging him. "Honest, you get worried about the darnedest things! He's _proud_ of you! Don't you know paternal boasting when you hear it?"

"Oh!" The shadow lifted and he laughed sheepishly. "I get it. It was nuance of idiom that threw me. Calling me a brat and a so-and-so was affectionate misdirection to conceal--" he broke off at their expressions. Helen darted a quick look around and came to his rescue again.

"Timmy-chile, where you git these heah high-falutin' _ex_-pressions I'll never know. Hit sh.o.r.e ain't from you' low-talkin' pappy."

"Or from yo' low-comedian mammy. It's all right, son--you just sound a bit bookish sometimes, that's all. Want some help with the dishes, Helen?"

"You know darn well you'd divorce me if I said yes. You and Clancey take Timmy in the front room and let him teach you something. Phil's just crazy to help with the dishes. Aren't you, Phil?"

"The obvious answer is yes. O. K., let's go."

They piled the dishes, joking and chattering until the sound of laughter from the front of the house told them that the others were occupied, then Helen put down the dish she was was.h.i.+ng.

"Well, Phil?"

"Am I supposed to know what that means?"

"Phil, in plain language, is Timmy a ... a genius?"

"No, I don't think so. He's unaccountably bright in many ways and just as unaccountably slow in others. I don't think genius comes into it at all."

"That's what I think, too. Timmy's no genius ... yet he does things that only a genius-type could do."

"Don't exaggerate, Helen. A sharp youngster living a secluded life and studying more than he plays may be years ahead of other kids who go to public schools."

"He's farther ahead than you think, Phil. I have Timmy in the house with me all day, so maybe I know him better than Jerry does. He fooled Jerry with that business of the college textbooks, but not me. I think that for some reason Timmy doesn't want us to know how advanced he really is.

I think he slipped up when he commented on that helical what's-it, then covered his slip by pretending he'd only leafed through the texts and picked up a bit here and there. I know when that boy's fooling, and I know he deliberately fluffed the questions Jerry put to him. Timmy's just plain lousy when it comes to dissembling, you know, as if it was completely foreign to him to lie. All right, all right, I know what you're going to say--fond mama building mother's-intuition fantasy around only child.

"Well, I kept an eye on him after that and about a week later Jerry brought home some calculus dealing with a new design he's developing. He ran into trouble with it and sweated and swore for an hour, while Timmy sat and read and I kept peeking in the hall mirror that lets you see into the front room from the kitchen. After a while Jerry left the room to look for some tables he wanted and Timmy slipped over and looked at his work, made a single notation, then dived back to his book as Jerry returned. Jerry started to sweat over the thing again, then suddenly did a double-take. He made some erasures and in five minutes had the whole thing worked out, cursing himself for misreading a figure or something.

"Now don't tell me it was just a coincidence. Timmy hadn't seen that problem before and it should have been miles over his head anyway, yet he gave it a quick glance, spotted the error, changed the limits of an integration and put Jerry on the right track. Just like that."

Phil carefully ma.s.saged a dry plate even drier.

"So I stagger back and gasp, 'I can't believe it!' or something insane but appropriate. The disturbing thing to me is that I not only _can_ believe it, I do believe it. Completely. I may as well tell you now what I haven't yet told anyone else, that I've been methodically tricking Timmy for some months past--in fact, ever since I began to suspect that his knowledge of the sciences was, to say the least, unusual for a boy his age. I probably led him into making that slip with Jerry, identifying the curve. By giving him the impression that any boy his age would know far more chemistry, math and physics than is actually the case, I tripped him into revealing that he himself knows a very great deal about them. Perhaps more than I do.

"I begin to suspect now that I didn't set my sights nearly high enough in leading him on, but G.o.d alone knows where he could have learned. On anything that could be related to the humanities he's very slow, but in the physical sciences he's out of this world. His secluded life--unable to mix with other kids, go to shows, games, or do anything that gets him into crowds--gives him a very limited background for understanding his environment, leaves him unboyish. He doesn't understand people. I constantly have the impression that he is anxious to do the right thing, but is simply baffled by problems in human relations."

"I know. He looks at me sometimes as though he's just desperate to reach me somehow--a lonely, unhappy little soul. He gets plenty of affection from both of us, but it isn't the answer--it just isn't the answer."

"Tell me, Helen, do you love your son?"

"Do I--! Well, now, really Phil--what kind of a question is that?"