The Fourth R | Page 5

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