The Fourth R | Page 6

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.
So was the word "Farewell."

But once his words were said, Jimmy Holden made his small but confident way to the
window of a railroad ticket agent.

CHAPTER TWO
You are a ticket agent, settled in the routine of your job. From nine to five-thirty, five
days a week, you see one face after another. There are cheerful faces, sullen faces, faces
that breathe garlic, whiskey, chewing gum, toothpaste and tobacco fumes. Old faces,
young faces, dull faces, scarred faces, clear faces, plain faces and faces so plastered