"Forget it," said the stranger. "Kid's had trouble. I'll carry him to the
road, you take him from there."
"Okay."
Getting up the ravine was a job of work for the man who carried Jimmy
Holden. Brennan gave a hand, aided with a lift, broke down brush, and
offered to take Jimmy now and again. Jimmy only clung tighter, and the
stranger waved Brennan away with a quick shake of his head.
By the time they reached the road, sirens were wailing on the road up
the hill. Police, firemen, and an ambulance swarmed over the scene. The
firemen went to work on the flaming car with practiced efficiency; the
police clustered around Paul Brennan and extracted from him a story that
had enough truth in it to sound completely convincing. The doctors from
the ambulance took charge of Jimmy Holden. Lacking any other accident
victim, they went to work on him with everything they could do.
They gave him mild sedation, wrapped him in a warm blanket, and put him
to bed on the cot in the ambulance with two of them watching over him. In
the presence of so many solicitous strangers, Jimmy's shock and fright
diminished. The sedation took hold. He dropped off in a light doze that
grew less fitful as time went on. By the time the official accident
report program was over, Jimmy Holden was fast asleep and resting
comfortably.
He did not hear Paul Brennan's suggestion that Jimmy go home with him,
to Paul Brennan's personal physician, nor did Jimmy hear the ambulance
attendants turn away Brennan's suggestion with hard-headed medical
opinion. Brennan could hardly argue with the fact that an accident victim
would be better off in a hospital under close observation. Shock demanded
it, and there was the hidden possibility of internal injury or concussion
to consider.
So Jimmy Holden awoke with his accident ten hours behind him, and the
good sleep had completed the standard recuperative powers of the healthy
child. He looked around, collecting himself, and then remembered the
accident. He cringed a bit and took another look and identified his
surroundings as some sort of a children's ward or dormitory.
He was in a crib.
He sat up angrily and rattled the gate of the crib. Putting James Quincy
Holden in a baby's crib was an insult.
He stopped, because the noise echoed through the room and one of the
younger patients stirred in sleep and moaned. Jimmy Holden sat back and
remembered. The vacuum that was to follow the loss of his parents was not
yet in evidence. They were gone and the knowledge made him unhappy, but
he was not cognizant of the real meaning or emotion of grief. With almost
the same feeling of loss he thought of the _Jungle Book_ he would never
read and the Spitz Planetarium he would never see casting its little star
images on his bedroom ceiling. Burned and ruined, with the atomic energy
kit--and he had hoped that he could use the kit to tease his father into
giving him some education in radioactivity. He was old enough to learn--
Learn--?
_No more, now that his father and mother were dead._
Some of the real meaning of his loss came to him then, and the growing
knowledge that this first shocking loss meant the ultimate loss of
everything was beginning to sink in.
He broke down and cried in the misery of his loss and his helplessness;
ultimately his emotion began to cry itself out, and he began to feel
resentment against his position. The animal desire to bite back at
anything that moved did not last long, it focused properly upon the
person of his tormentor. Then for a time, Jimmy Holden's imagination
indulged in a series of little vignettes in which he scored his victory
over Paul Brennan. These little playlets went through their own
evolution, starting with physical victory reminiscent of his
Jack-and-the-Beanstalk days to a more advanced triumph of watching Paul
Brennan led away in handcuffs whilst the District Attorney scanned the
sheaf of indisputable evidence provided by James Quincy Holden.
Somewhere along about this point in his fantasy, a breath of the
practical entered, and Jimmy began to consider the more sensible problem
of what sort of information this sheaf of evidence would contain.
Still identifying himself with the books he knew, Jimmy Holden had
progressed from the fairy story--where the villain was evil for no more
motive than to provide menace to the hero--to his more advanced books,
where the villain did his evil deeds for the logical motive of personal
gain.
Well, what had Paul Brennan to gain?
Money, for one thing--he would be executor of the Holden Estate. But
there wasn't enough to justify killing. Revenge? For what? Jealousy? For
whom? Hate? Envy? Jimmy Holden glossed the words quickly, for they were
no more than words that carried definitions that did not really explain
them. He could read with the facility of an adult, but a book written for
a sophisticated audience went over his head.
No, there was only one possible thing of appreciable value; the one thing
that Paul Brennan hoped to gain was the device over which they had worked
through all the long years to perfect: The Holden Electromechanical
Educator! Brennan wanted it badly enough to murder for its possession!
And with a mind and ingenuity far beyond his years, Jimmy Holden knew
that he alone was the most active operator in this vicious drama. It was
not without shock that he realized that he himself could still be killed
to gain possession of his fabulous machine. For only with all _three_
Holdens dead could Paul Brennan take full and unquestioned possession.
* * * * *
With daylight clarity he knew what he had to do. In a single act of
destruction he could simultaneously foil Paul Brennan's plan and ensure
his own life.
Permanently installed in Jimmy Holden's brain by the machine itself were
the full details of how to recreate it. Indelibly he knew each wire and
link, lever and coil, section by section and piece by piece. It was
incomprehensible information, about in the same way that the printing
press "knows" the context of its metal plate. Step by step he could
rebuild it once he had the means of procuring the parts, and it would
work even though he had not the foggiest notion (now) of what the various
parts did.
So if the delicate heart of his father's machine were utterly destroyed,
Paul Brennan would be extremely careful about preserving the life of
James Quincy Holden.
He considered his position and what he knew:
Physically, he was a five-year-old. He stood forty-one inches tall and
weighed thirty-nine pounds. A machinist's hammer was a two-handed tool
and a five-pound sack of sugar was a burden. Doorknobs and latches were a
problem in manipulation. The negotiation of a swinging door was a feat of
muscular engineering. Electric light switches were placed at a tiptoe
reach because, naturally, everything in the adult world is designed by
the adults for the convenience of adults. This makes it difficult for the
child who has no adult to do his bidding.
Intellectually, Jimmy Holden was something else.
Reverting to a curriculum considered sound prior to Mr. Dewey's
often-questionable and more often misused programs of schooling, Jimmy's
parents had trained and educated their young man quite well in the
primary informations of fact. He read with facility and spoke with a fine
vocabulary--although no amount of intellectual training could make his
voice change until his glands did. His knowledge of history, geography
and literature were good, because he'd used them to study reading. He was
well into plane geometry and had a smattering of algebra, and there had
been a pause due to a parental argument as to the advisability of his
memorizing a table of six-place logarithms via the Holden machine.
Extra-curricularly, Jimmy Holden had acquired snippets, bits, and
wholesale chunks of a number of the arts and sciences and other
aggregations of information both pertinent and trivial for one reason
or another. As an instance, he had absorbed an entire bridge book by
Charles Goren just to provide a fourth to sit in with his parents and
Paul Brennan.
Consequently, James Holden had in data the education of a boy of about
sixteen, and in other respects, much more.
He escaped from the hospital simply because no one ever thought that a
five-year-old boy would have enough get-up-and-go to climb out of his
crib, rummage a nearby closet, dress himself, and then calmly walk out.
The clothing of a cocky teen-ager would have been impounded and his
behavior watched.
They did not miss him for hours. He went, taking the little
identification card from its frame at the foot of his bed--and that
ruined the correlation between tag and patient.
By the time an overworked nurse stopped to think and finally asked,
"Kitty, are you taking care of the little boy in Bed 6 over in 219?" and
received the answer, "No, aren't you?" Jimmy Holden was trudging up the
hill towards his home. Another hour went by with the two worried nurses
surreptitiously searching the rest of the hospital in the simple hope
that he had wandered away and could be restored before it came to the
attention of the officials. By the time they gave up and called in other
nurses (who helped them in their anxiety to conceal) Jimmy was entering
his home.
Each succeeding level of authority was loath to report the truth to the
next higher up.
By the time the general manager of the hospital forced himself to call
Paul Brennan, Jimmy Holden was demolishing the last broken bits of
disassembled subassemblies he had smashed from the heart-circuit of the
Holden Electromechanical Educator. He was most thorough. Broken glass
went into the refuse buckets, bent metal was buried in the garden,
inflammables were incinerated, and meltables and fusibles slagged down in
ashes that held glass, bottle, and empty tin-can in an unrecognizable
mass. He left a gaping hole in the machine that Brennan could not
fill--nor could any living man fill it now but James Quincy Holden.
And only when this destruction was complete did Jimmy Holden first begin
to understand his father's statement about the few men who see what has
to be done, do it, _and then_ look to the next inevitable problem created
by their own act.
It was late afternoon by the time Jimmy had his next moves figured out.
He left the home he'd grown up in, the home of his parents, of his own
babyhood. He'd wandered through it for the last time, touching this and
saying goodbye to that. He was certain that he would never see his things
again, nor the house itself, but the real vacuum of his loss hadn't yet
started to form. The concepts of "never" and "forever" were merely words
that had no real impact.