The Fourth R | Page 9

glass of warmed milk and a plate of cookies. He sat down and
asked, "What happened, Jimmy?"
"My mother and father are--"
"You eat your cookies and drink your milk," ordered his grandmother. "We know. That
Mr. Brennan sent us a telegram."
* * * * *

It was slightly more than twenty-four hours since Jimmy Holden had blown out the five
proud candles on his birthday cake and begun to open his fine presents. Now it all came
back with a rush, and when it came back, nothing could stop it.
Jimmy never knew how very like a little boy of five he sounded that night. His speech
was clear enough, but his troubled mind was too full to take the time to form his headlong
thoughts into proper sentences. He could not pause to collect his thoughts into any
chronology, so it came out going back and forth all in a single line, punctuated only by
necessary pauses for the intake of breath. He was close to tears before he was halfway
through, and by the time he came to the end he stopped in a sob and broke out crying.
His grandfather said, "Jimmy, aren't you exaggerating? Mr. Brennan isn't that sort of a
man."
"He is too!" exploded Jimmy through his tears. "I saw him!"
"But--"
"Donald, this is no time to start cross-examining a child." She crossed the room and lifted
him onto her lap; she stroked his head and held his cheek against her shoulder. His open
crying subsided into deep sobs; from somewhere she found a handkerchief and made him
blow his nose--once, twice, and then a deep thrice. "Get me a warm washcloth," she told
her husband, and with it she wiped away his tears. The warmth soothed Jimmy more.
"Now," she said firmly, "before we go into this any more we'll have a good night's sleep."
The featherbed was soft and cozy. Like protecting mother-wings, it folded Jimmy into its
bosom, and the warm softness drew out of Jimmy whatever remained of his stamina.
Tonight he slept of weariness and exhaustion, not of the sedation given last night. Here
he felt at home, and it was good.
And as tomorrows always had, tomorrow would take care of itself.
Jimmy Holden's father and mother first met over an operating table, dressed in the white
sterility that leaves only the eyes visible. She wielded the trephine that laid the patient's
brain bare, he kept track of the patient's life by observing the squiggles on the roll of
graph paper that emerged from his encephalograph. She knew nothing of the craft of the
delicate instrument-creator, and he knew even less of the craft of surgery. There had been
a near-argument during the cleaning-up session after the operation; the near-argument
ended when they both realized that neither of them understood a word of what the other
was saying. So the near-argument became an animated discussion, the general meaning
of which became clear: Brain surgeons should know more about the intricacies of
electromechanics, and the designers of delicate, precision instrumentation should know
more about the mass of human gray matter they were trying to measure.
They pooled their intellects and plunged into the problem of creating an encephalograph
that would record the infinitesimal irregularities that were superimposed upon the great
waves. Their operation became large; they bought the old structure on top of the hill and

moved in, bag and baggage. They cohabited but did not live together for almost a year;
Paul Brennan finally pointed out that Organized Society might permit a couple of
geniuses to become research hermits, but Organized Society still took a dim view of
cohabitation without a license. Besides, such messy arrangements always cluttered up the
legal clarity of chattels, titles, and estates.
They married in a quiet ceremony about two years prior to the date that Louis Holden
first identified the fine-line wave-shapes that went with determined ideas. When he
recorded them and played them back, his brain re-traced its original line of thought, and
he could not even make a mental revision of the way his thoughts were arranged. For two
years Louis and Laura Holden picked their way slowly through this field; stumped at one
point for several months because the machine was strictly a personal proposition.
Recorded by one of them, the playback was clear to that one, but to the other it was wild
gibberish--an inexplicable tangle of noise and colored shapes, odors and tastes both
pleasant and nasty, and mingled sensations. It was five years after their marriage before
they found success by engraving information in the brain by sitting, connected to the
machine, and reading aloud, word for word, the information that they wanted.
It went by rote, as they had learned in childhood. It was