Judge Carter insisted and won his point that James Holden accept
residence in his home.
He did not turn a hair when the trucks of equipment arrived from the
house on Martin's Hill; he already had room for it in the cellar. He
cheerfully allowed James the right to set it up and test it out. He
respected James Holden's absolute insistence that no one be permitted to
touch the special circuit that was the heart of the entire machine. Judge
Carter also counter-requested--and enforced the request--that he be
allowed to try the machinery out. He took a simple reading course in
higher mathematics, after discovering that Holden's machine would not
teach him how to play the violin. (Judge Carter already played the
violin--but badly.)
Later, the judge committed to memory the entire book of Bartlett's Famous
Quotations despite the objection of young Holden that he was cluttering
up his memory with a lot of useless material. The Judge learned (as James
had learned earlier) that the proper way to store such information in the
memory was to read the book with the machine turned in "stand-by" until
some section was encountered that was of interest. Using this method, the
judge picked and pecked at the Holy Bible, a number of documents that
looked like important governmental records, and a few books in modern
history.
Then there came other men. First was a Professor Harold White from the
State Board of Education who came to study both Holden and Holden's
machinery and what it did. Next came a Dr. Persons who said very little
but made diagrams and histograms and graphs which he studied. The third
was a rather cheerful fellow called Jack Cowling who was more interested
in James Holden's personal feelings than he was in the machine. He
studied many subjects superficially and watched the behavior of young
Holden as Holden himself studied subjects recommended by Professor White.
White had a huge blackboard installed on the cellar wall opposite the
machine, and he proceeded to fill the board with block outlines filled
with crabbed writing and odd-looking symbols. The whole was meaningless
to James Holden; it looked like the organization chart of a large
corporation but it contained no names or titles. The arrival of each new
visitor caused changes in the block diagram.
These arrivals went at their project with stop watches and slide rules.
They calibrated themselves and James with the cold-blooded attitude of
racetrack touts clocking their favorite horses. Where James had simply
taken what he wanted or what he could at any single sitting, then let
it settle in his mind before taking another dose of unpremeditated
magnitude, these fellows ascertained the best effectiveness of each
application to each of them. They tried taking long terms under the
machine and then they measured the time it took for the installed
information to sink in and settle into usable shape. Then they tried
shorter and shorter sittings and measured the correspondingly shorter
settling times. They found out that no two men were alike, nor were any
two subjects. They discovered that a man with an extensive education
already could take a larger sitting and have the new information
available for mental use in a shorter settling time than a man whose
education had been sketchy or incomplete.
They brought in men who had either little or no mathematics and gave them
courses in advanced subjects. Afterwards they provided the foundation
mathematics and they calibrated and measured the time it took for the
higher subject to be understood as it aligned its information to the
whole. Men came with crude English and bluntly read the dictionary and
the proper rules of grammar and they were checked to see if their early
bad-speech habits were corrected, and to what degree the Holden machine
could be made to help repair the damage of a lifelong ingrained set of
errors. They sent some of these boys through comparison dictionaries in
foreign tongues and then had their language checked by specialists who
were truly polylingual. There were some who spoke fluent English but no
other tongue; these progressed into German with a German-to-English
comparison dictionary, and then into French via a German-to-French
comparison and were finally checked out in French by French-speaking
examiners.
And Professor White's block diagram grew complex, and Dr. Persons's
histograms filled pages and pages of his broad notebooks.
It was the first time that James Holden had ever seen a team of
researchers plow into a problem, running a cold and icy scientific
investigation to ascertain precisely how much cause produced how much
effect. Holden, who had taken what he wanted or needed as the time came,
began to understand the desirability of full and careful programming. The
whole affair intrigued him and interested him. He plunged in with a will
and gave them all the help he could.
He had no time to be bored, and he did not mark the passage of time until
he arrived at his thirteenth birthday.
Then one night shortly after his birthday, James Holden discovered women
indirectly. He had his first erotic dream.
We shall not go into the details of this midnight introduction to the
arrival of manhood, for the simple reason that if we dwell on the
subject, someone is certain to attempt a dream-analysis and come up with
some flanged-up character-study or personality-quirk that really has
nothing to do with the mind or body of James Holden. The truth is that
his erotic dream was pleasantly stirring, but not entirely satisfactory.
It was fun while it lasted, but it didn't last very long. It awakened him
to the realization that knowledge is not the end-all of life, and that a
full understanding of the words, the medical terms, and the biology
involved did not tell him a thing about this primary drive of all life.
His total grasp of even the sideline issues was still dim. He came to a
partial understanding of why Jake Caslow had entertained late visitors of
the opposite sex, but he still could not quite see the reason why Jake
kept the collection of calendar photographs and paintings hung up around
the place. Crude jokes and rude talk heard long years before and dimly
remembered did not have much connection with the subject. To James
Holden, a "tomato" was still a vegetable, although he knew that some
botanists were willing to argue that the tomato was really a fruit.
For many days he watched Judge Carter and his wife with a critical
curiosity that their childless life had never known before. James found
that they did not act as if something new and strangely thrilling had
just hit the known universe. He felt that they should know about it.
Despite the fact that he knew everything that his textbooks could tell
him about sex and copulation he still had the quaint notion that the
reason why Judge Carter and his wife were childless was because they had
not yet gotten around to Doing It. He made no attempt to correlate this
oddity with its opposite in Jake Caslow's ladies of the night who seemed
to go on their merry way without conceiving.
He remembered the joking parry-and-thrust of that midnight talk between
Tim Fisher and Janet Bagley but it made no sense to him still. But as he
pondered the multitude of puzzlements, some of the answers fell partly
into place just as some of the matching pieces of a jigsaw puzzle may lie
close to one another when they are dumped out of the box. Very dimly
James began to realize that this sort of thing was not New, but to the
contrary it had been going on for a long, long time. So long in fact that
neither Tim Fisher nor Janet Bagley had found it necessary to state
desire and raise objection respectively in simple clear sentences
containing subject, verb, and object. This much came to him and it
bothered him even more, now that he understood that they were bandying
their meanings lightly over a subject so vital, so important, so--so
completely personal.
Then, in that oddly irrational corner of his brain that neither knowledge
nor information had been adequate to rationalize nor had experience
arrived to supply the explanation, James Holden's limited but growing
comprehension arrived at a conclusion that was reasonable within its
limited framework. Judge Carter and his wife occupied separate bedrooms
and had therefore never Done It. Conversely, Tim and Janet Fisher from
their midnight discussion obviously Knew What It Was All About. James
wondered whether they had Done It yet, and he also wondered whether he
could tell by listening to their discussions and conversations now that
they'd been married at least long enough to have Tried It.
With a brand new and very interesting subject to study, James lost
interest in the program of concentrated research. James Holden found that
all he had to do to arrange a trip to Shipmont was to state his desire to
go and the length of his visit. The judge deemed both reasonable, Mrs.
Carter packed James a bag, and off he went.
* * * * *
The house on Martin's Hill was about the same, with some improvement such
as a coat of paint and some needed repair work. The grounds had been
worked over, but it was going to take a number of years of concentrated
gardening to de-weed the tangled lawn and to cut the undergrowth in the
thin woodsy back area where James had played in concealment.
But the air inside was changed. Janet, as Mrs. Bagley, had been as close
to James Holden as any substitute mother could have been. Now she seemed
preoccupied and too busy with her own life to act more than pleasantly
polite. He could have been visiting the home of a friend instead of
returning to the domicile he had created, in which he had provided her
with a home--for herself and a frightened little girl. She asked him how
he had been and what he was doing, but he felt that this was more a
matter of taking up time than real interest. He had the feeling that
somewhere deep inside, her soul was biting its fingernails. She spoke of
Martha with pride and hope, she asked how Judge Carter was making out and
whether Martha would be able to finish her schooling via Holden's
machine.
James believed this was her problem. Martha had been educated far beyond
her years. She could no more enter school now than he could; unwittingly
he'd made Martha a misfit, too. So James tried to explain that part of
the study undertaken in Judge Carter's program had been the question of
what to do about Martha.
The professionals studying the case did not know yet whether Martha would
remain ahead of her age group, or whether to let her loaf it out until
her age group caught up with her, or whether to give Martha everything
she could take as fast as she could take it. This would make a female
counterpart of James Holden to study.
But knowing that there were a number of very brilliant scientists,
educators, and psychologists working on Martha's problem did not cheer up
Mrs. Janet Fisher as much as James thought it should. Yet as he watched
her, he could not say that Tim Fisher's wife was _unhappy_.
Tim, on the other hand, looked fine. James watched them together as
critically curious as he'd been in watching the Judge and Mrs. Carter.
Tim was gentle with his wife, tender, polite, and more than willing to
wait on her. From their talk and chit-chat, James could detect nothing.
There were still elisions, questions answered with a half-phrase,
comments added with a disconnected word and replied in another word
that--in cold print--would appear to have no bearing on the original
subject. This sort of thing told James nothing. Judge Carter and his wife
did the same; if there were any difference to be noted it was only in the
basic subject materials. The judge and his wife were inclined more toward
discussions of political questions and judicial problems, whereas Tim and
Janet Fisher were more interested in music, movies, and the general trend
of the automobile repair business; or more to the point, whether to
expand the present facility in Shipmont, to open another branch
elsewhere, or to sell out to buy a really big operation in some sizable
city.
James saw a change in Martha, too. It had been months since he came back
home to supervise the removal of his belongings. Now Martha had filled
out. She was dressed in a shirt-and-skirt instead of the little jumper
dresses James remembered. Martha's hair was lightly wavy instead of
trimmed short, and she was wearing a very faint touch of color on her
lips. She wore tiny slippers with heels just a trifle higher than the
altitude recommended for a girl close to thirteen.
Ultimately they fell into animated chatter of their own, just as they
always had. There was a barrier between the pair of them and Martha's
mother and stepfather--slightly higher than the usual barrier erected
between children and their adults because of their educational adventures
together. They had covered reams and volumes together. Martha's mother
was interested in Holden's machine only when something specific came to
her attention that she did not wish to forget such as a recipe or a
pattern, and one very extensive course that enabled her to add a column
of three-digit numbers by the whole lines instead of taking each column
digit by digit. Tim Fisher himself had deeper interests, but nearly all
of them directed at making Tim Fisher a better manager of the automobile
repair business. There had been some discussion of the possibility that
Tim Fisher might memorize some subject such as the names of all baseball
players and their yearly and lifetime scoring, fielding, and playing
averages, training for him to go as a contestant on one of the big money
giveaway shows. This never came to pass; Tim Fisher did not have any
spectacular qualities about him that would land him an invitation. So
Tim's work with Holden's machine had been straightforward studies in
mechanics and bookkeeping and business management--plus a fine repertoire
of bawdy songs he had rung in on the sly and subsequently used at
parties.
James and Martha had taken all they wanted of education and available
information, sometimes with plan and the guidance of schoolbooks and
sometimes simply because they found the subject of interest. In the past
they'd had discussions of problems in understanding; they'd talked of
things that parents and elders would have considered utterly impossible
to discuss with young minds. With this communion of interests, they fell
back into their former pattern of first joining the general conversation
politely and then gradually confining their remarks to one another until
there were two conversations going on at the same time, one between
James and Martha and another between Janet and Tim. Again, the vocal
interference and cross-talk became too high, and it was Tim and Janet who
left the living room to mix a couple of highballs and start dinner.
The chatter continued, but now with a growing strain on the part of young
James Holden.
He wanted to switch to a more personal topic of conversation but he did
not know how to accomplish this feat. There was plenty of interest but it
was more clinical than passionate; he was not stirred to yearning, he
felt no overwhelming desire to hold Martha's hand nor to feel the
softness of her face, yet there was a stirring urge to make some form of
contact. But he had no idea of how to steer the conversation towards
personal lines that might lead into something that would justify a
gesture towards her. It began to work on him. The original clinical urge
to touch her just to see what reaction would obtain changed into a
personal urge that grew higher as he found that he could not kick the
conversational ball in that direction. The idea of putting an arm about
her waist as he had seen men embrace their girls on television was a
pleasing thought; he wanted to find out if kissing was as much fun as it
was made up to be.
But instead of offering him any encouragement, or even giving him a
chance to start shifting the conversation, Martha went prattling on and
on and on about a book she'd read recently.
It did not occur to James Holden that Martha Bagley might entertain the
idea of physical contact of some mild sort on an experimental basis. He
did not even consider the possibility that he might _start_ her thinking
about it. So instead of closing the distance between them like a gentle
wolf, watching with sly calculation to ascertain whether her response was
positive, negative, or completely neutral, he sat like a post and fretted
inwardly because he couldn't control the direction of their conversation.
Ultimately, of course, Martha ran out of comment on her book and then
there fell a deadly silence because James couldn't dredge up another
lively subject. Desperately, he searched through his mind for an opening.
There was none. The bright patter between male and female characters in
books he'd smuggled started off on too high a level on both sides. Books
that were written adequately for his understanding of this problem signed
off with the trite explanation that they lived happily ever afterwards
but did not say a darned thing about how they went about it. The slightly
lurid books that he'd bought, delivered in plain wrappers, gave some very
illuminating descriptions of the art or act, but the affair opened with
the scene all set and the principal characters both ready, willing, and
able. There was no conversational road map that showed the way that led
two people from a calm and unemotional discussion into an area that might
lead to something entirely else.
In silence, James Holden sat there sinking deeper and deeper into his own
misery.
The more he thought about it, the farther he found himself from his
desire. Later in the process, he knew, came a big barrier called
"stealing a kiss," and James with his literal mind provided this game
with an aggressor, a defender, and the final extraction by coercion or
violence of the first osculatory contact. If the objective could be
carried off without the defense repulsing the advance, the rest was
supposed to come with less trouble. But here he was floundering before he
began, let alone approaching the barrier that must be an even bigger
problem.
Briefly he wished that it were Christmas, because at Christmas people
hung up mistletoe. Mistletoe would not only provide an opening by
custom and tradition, it also cut through this verbal morass of trying
to lead up to the subject by the quick process of supplying the subject
itself. But it was a long time before Christmas. James abandoned that
ill-conceived idea and went on sinking deep and feeling miserable.
Then Martha's mother took James out of his misery by coming in to
announce dinner. Regretfully, James sighed for his lost moments and
helplessness, then got to his feet and held out a hand for Martha.
She put her hand in his and allowed him to lift her to her feet by
pulling. The first contact did not stir him at all, though it was warm
and pleasant. Once the pulling pressure was off, he continued to hold
Martha's hand, tentatively and experimentally.
Then Janet Fisher showered shards of ice with a light laugh. "You two can
stand there holding hands," she said. "But I'm going to eat it while it's
on the table."
James Holden's hand opened with the swiftness of a reflex action, almost
as fast as the wink of an eye at the flash of light or the body's jump at
the crack of sound. Martha's hand did not drop because she, too, was
holding his and did not let go abruptly. She giggled, gave his hand a
little squeeze and said, "Let's go. I'm hungry too."
None of which solved James Holden's problem. But during dinner his
personal problem slipped aside because he discovered another slight
change in Janet Fisher's attitude. He puzzled over it quietly, but
managed to eat without any apparent preoccupation. Dinner took about a
half hour, after which they spent another fifteen minutes over coffee,
with Janet refusing her second cup. She disappeared at the first shuffle
of a foot under the table, while James and Martha resumed their years-old
chore of clearing the table and tackling the dishwashing problem.