The Fourth "R"

by George O. Smith

THE HERMIT

---

CHAPTER SEVEN

Seventy-five miles south of Chicago there is a whistle-stop called Shipmont. (No ship has ever been anywhere near it; neither has a mountain.) It lives because of a small college; the college, in turn, owes its maintenance to an installation of great interest to the Atomic Energy Commission.

Shipmont is served by two trains a day—which stop only when there is a passenger to get on or off, which isn't often. These passengers, generally speaking, are oddballs carrying attaché cases or eager young men carrying miniature slide rules.

But on this day came a woman and a little girl.

Their total visible possessions were two battered suitcases and one battered trunk. The little girl was neatly dressed, in often-washed and mended clothing; she carried a small covered basket, and there were breadcrumbs visible on the lid. She looked bewildered, shy and frightened. She was.

The mother was thirty, though there were lines of worry on her forehead and around her eyes that made her look older. She wore little makeup and her clothing had been bought for wear instead of for looks. She looked around, leaned absently down to pat the little girl and straightened as the station-master came slowly out.

"Need anything, ma'am?" He was pleasant enough. Janet Bagley appreciated that; life had not been entirely pleasant for her for some years.

"I need a taxicab, if there is one."

"There is. I run it after the train gets in for them as ain't met. You're not goin' to the college?" He pronounced it "collitch."

Janet Bagley shook her head and took a piece of paper from her bag. "Mr. Charles Maxwell, Rural Route Fifty-three, Martin's Hill Road," she read. Her daughter began to whimper.

The station-master frowned. "Hum," he said, "that's the Herm—er, d'you know him?"

Mrs. Bagley said: "I've never met him. What kind of a man is he?"

That was the sort of question the station-master appreciated. His job was neither demanding nor exciting; an opportunity to talk was worth having. He said cheerfully, "Why, I don't rightly know, ma'am. Nobody's ever seen him."

"Nobody?"

"Nope. Nobody. Does everything by mail."

"My goodness, what's the matter with him?"

"Don't rightly know, ma'am. Story is he was once a professor and got in some kind of big explosion. Burned the hide off'n his face and scarred up his hands something turrible, so he don't want to show himself. Rented the house by mail, pays his rent by mail. Orders stuff by mail. Mostly not real U-nited States Mail, y'know, because we don't mind dropping off a note to someone in town. I'm the local mailman, too. So when I find a note to Herby Wharton, the fellow that owns the general store, I drop it off. Margie Clark over at the bank says he writes. Gets checks from New York from publishing companies." The station-master looked around as if he were looking for Soviet spies. "He's a scientist, all right. He's doin' something important and hush-hush up there. Lots and lots of boxes and packin' cases I've delivered up there from places like Central Scientific and Labotory Supply Company. Must be a smart feller. You visitin' him?"

"Well, he hired me for housekeeper. By mail." Mrs. Bagley looked puzzled and concerned.

Little Martha began to cry.

"It'll be all right," said the station-master soothingly. "You keep your eye open," he said to Mrs. Bagley. "Iff'n you see anything out of line, you come right back and me and the missus will give you a lift. But he's all right. Nothin' goin' on up there that I know of. Fred Riordan—he's the sheriff—has watched the place for days and days and it's always quiet. No visitors. No nothin'. Know what I think? I think he's experimenting with something to take away the burn scars. That's whut I think. Well, hop in and I'll drive you out there."

"Is it going to cost much?"

"Nothin' this trip. We'll charge it to the U-nited States Mail. Got a package goin' out. Was waitin' for something else to go along with it, but you're here and we can count that. This way to the only taxicab service in Shipmont."

The place looked deserted. It was a shabby old clapboard house; the architecture of the prosperous farmer of seventy-five years ago. The grounds were spacious but the space was filled with scrub weeds. A picket fence surrounded the weeds with uncertain security. The windows—those that could be seen, that is—were dirty enough to prevent seeing inside with clarity, and what transparency there was left was covered by curtains. The walk up the "lawn" was flagstone with crabgrass between the stones.

The station-master unshipped the small trunk and stood it just inside the fence. He parked the suitcases beside it. "Never go any farther than this," he explained. "So far's I know, you're the first person to ever head up thet walk to the front door."

Mrs. Bagley rapped on the door. It opened almost instantly.

"I'm—" then Mrs. Bagley dropped her eyes to the proper level. To the lad who was standing there she said, "I'm Mrs. Bagley. Your father—a Mr. Charles Maxwell is expecting me."

"Come in," said Jimmy Holden. "Mr. Maxwell—well, he isn't my father. He sent me to let you in."

Mrs. Bagley entered and dropped her suitcases in the front hall. Martha held back behind her mother's skirt. Jimmy closed the door and locked it carefully, but left the key in the keyhole with a gesture that Mrs. Bagley could not mistake. "Please come in here and sit down," said James Holden. "Relax a moment." He turned to look at the girl. He smiled at her, but she cowered behind her mother's skirt as if she wanted to bury her face but was afraid to lose sight of what was going on around her.

"What's your name?" asked James.

She retreated, hiding most of her face. Mrs. Bagley stroked her hair and said, "Now, Martha, come on. Tell the little boy your name."

Purely as a matter of personal pride, James Holden objected to the "little boy" but he kept his peace because he knew that at eight years old he was still a little boy. In a soothing way, James said, "Come on out, Martha. I'll show you some girl-type toys we've got."

The girl's head emerged slowly, "I'm Martha Bagley," she announced.

"How old are you?"

"I'm seven."

"I'm eight," stated James. "Come on."

Mrs. Bagley looked around. She saw that the dirt on the windows was all on the outside. The inside was clean. So was the room. So were the curtains. The room needed a dusting—a most thorough dusting. It had been given a haphazard lick-and-a-promise cleanup not too long ago, but the cleanup before that had been as desultory as the last, and without a doubt the one before and the one before that had been of the same sort of half-hearted cleaning. As a woman and a housekeeper, Mrs. Bagley found the room a bit strange.

The furniture caught her eye first. A standard open bookcase, a low sofa, a very low cocktail-type table. The chair she stood beside was standard looking, so was the big easy chair opposite. Yet she felt large in the room despite its old-fashioned high ceiling. There were several low footstools in the room; ungraceful things that were obviously wooden boxes covered with padding and leatherette. The straight chair beside her had been lowered; the bottom rung between the legs was almost on the floor.

She realized why she felt big. The furniture in the room had all been cut down.

She continued to look. The strangeness continued to bother her and she realized that there were no ash trays; there was none of the usual clutter of things that a family drops in their tracks. It was a room fashioned for a small person to live in but it wasn't lived-in.

The lack of hard cleanliness did not bother her very much. There had been an effort here, and the fact that this Charles Maxwell was hiring a housekeeper was in itself a statement that the gentleman knew that he needed one. It was odd, but it wasn't ominous.

She shook her daughter gently and said, "Come on, Martha. Let's take a look at these girl-type toys."

James led them through a short hallway, turned left at the first door, and then stood aside to give them a full view of the room. It was a playroom for a girl. It was cleaner than the living room, and as—well, untouched. It had been furnished with girl-toys that some catalog "recommended as suitable for a girl of seven."

The profusion of toys overwhelmed little Martha. She stood just inside of the door with her eyes wide, glancing back and forth. She took one slow step forward, then another. Then she quickened. She moved through the room looking, then putting out a slow, hesitant hand to touch very gently. Tense, as if she were waiting for the warning not to touch, Martha finally caressed the hair of a baby doll.

Mrs. Bagley smiled. "I'll have a time prying her loose from here," she said.

James nodded his head. "Let her amuse herself for a bit," he said. "With Martha occupied, you can give your attention to a more delicate matter."

Mrs. Bagley forgot that she was addressing an eight-year-old boy. His manner and his speech bemused her. "Yes," she said. "I do want to get this settled with your mysterious Charles Maxwell. Do you expect him down, or shall I go upstairs—?"

"This may come as a shock, Mrs. Bagley, but Charles Maxwell isn't here."

"Isn't here?" she echoed, in a tone of voice that clearly indicated that she had heard the words but hadn't really grasped their full meaning. "He won't be gone long, will he?"

James watched her covertly, then said in a matter-of-fact voice, "He left you a letter."

"Letter?"

"He was called away on some urgent business."

"But—"

"Please read the letter. It explains everything."

He handed her an envelope addressed to "Mrs. Janet Bagley." She looked at it from both sides, in the womanlike process of trying to divine its contents instead of opening it. She looked at James, but James sat stolidly waiting. Mrs. Bagley was going to get no more information from him until she read that letter, and James was prepared to sit it out until she did. It placed Mrs. Bagley in the awkward position of having to decide what to do next. Then the muffled sound of little-girl crooning came from the distant room. That brought the realization that as odd as this household was, it was a home. Mrs. Bagley delayed no further. She opened the letter and read:

My Dear Mrs. Bagley:

I deeply regret that I am not there to greet you, but it was not possible. However, please understand that insofar as I am concerned, you were hired and have been drawing your salary from the date that I forwarded railroad fare and traveling expenses. Any face-to-face meeting is no more than a pleasantry, a formal introduction. It must not be considered in any way connected with the thought of a "Final Interview" or the process of "Closing the Deal."

Please carry on as if you had been in charge long before I departed, or—considering my hermitlike habits—the way you would have carried on if I had not departed, but instead was still upstairs and hard at work with most definite orders that I was not to be disturbed for anything less important than total, personal disaster.

I can offer you a word of explanation about young James. You will find him extraordinarily competent for a youngster of eight years. Were he less competent, I might have delayed my departure long enough to pass him literally from my supervision to yours. However, James is quite capable of taking care of himself; this fact you will appreciate fully long before you and I meet face-to-face.

In the meantime, remember that our letters and the other references acquaint us with one another far better than a few short hours of personal contact.

Sincerely,
Charles Maxwell

"Well!" said Mrs. Bagley. "I don't know what to say."

Jimmy smiled. "You don't have to say anything," he said.

Mrs. Bagley looked at the youngster. "I don't think I like your Mr. Maxwell," she said.

"Why not?"

"He's practically shanghaied me here. He knows very well that I couldn't possibly leave you here all alone, no matter how I disliked the situation. He's practically forced me to stay."

James suppressed a smile. He said, "Mrs. Bagley, the way the trains run in and out of Shipmont, you're stuck for an overnight stay in any case."

"You don't seem to be perturbed."

"I'm not," he said.

Mrs. Bagley looked at James carefully. His size; his physique was precisely that of the eight-year-old boy. There was nothing malformed nor out-of-proportion; yet he spoke with an adult air of confidence.

"I am," she admitted.

"Perturbed? You needn't be," he said. "You've got to remember that writers are an odd lot. They don't conform. They don't punch time-clocks. They boast of having written a novel in three weeks but they don't mention the fact that they sat around drinking beer for six months plotting it."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that Maxwell sees nothing wrong in attending to his own affairs and expecting you to attend to yours."

"But what shall I do?"

James smiled. "First, take a look around the house and satisfy yourself. You'll find the third floor shut off; the rooms up there are Maxwell's, and no one goes in but him. My bedroom is the big one in the front of the second floor. Pick yourself a room or a suite of rooms or move in all over the rest of the house. Build yourself a cup of tea and relax. Do as he says: Act as if you'd arrived before he took off, that you'd met and agreed verbally to do what you've already agreed to do by letter. Look at it from his point of view."

"What is his point of view?"

"He's a writer. He rented this house by mail. He banks by mail and shops by mail and makes his living by writing. Don't be surprised when he hires a housekeeper by mail and hands her the responsibility in writing. He lives by the written word."

Mrs. Bagley said, "In other words, the fact that he offered me a job in writing and I took it in writing—?"

"Writing," said James Holden soberly, "was invented for the express purpose of recording an agreement between two men in a permanent form that could be read by other men. The whole world runs on the theory that no one turns a hand until names are signed to written contracts—and here you sit, not happy because you weren't contracted-for by a personal chit-chat and a handshake."

Mrs. Bagley was taken aback slightly by this rather pointed criticism. What hurt was the fact that, generally speaking, it was true and especially the way he put it. The young man was too blunt, too out-spokenly direct. Obviously he needed someone around the place who wasn't the self-centered writer-type. And, Mrs. Bagley admitted to herself, there certainly was no evidence of evil-doing here.

No matter what, Charles Maxwell had neatly trapped her into staying by turning her own maternal responsibility against her.

"I'll get my bags," she said.

James Holden took a deep breath. He'd won this hurdle, so far so good. Now for the next!

Mrs. Bagley found life rather unhurried in the days that followed. She relaxed and tried to evaluate James Holden. To her unwarned mind, the boy was quite a puzzle.

There was no doubt about his eight years, except that he did not whoop and holler with the aimlessness of the standard eight-year-old boy. His vocabulary was far ahead of the eight-year-old and his speech was in adult grammar rather than halting. It was, she supposed, due to his constant adult company; children denied their contemporaries for playmates often take on attitudes beyond their years. Still, it was a bit on the too-superior side to please her. It was as if he were the result of over-indulgent parents who'd committed the mistake of letting the child know that their whole universe revolved about him.

Yet Maxwell's letters said that he was motherless, that he was not Maxwell's son. This indicated a probable history of broken homes and remarriages. Mrs. Bagley thought the problem over and gave it up. It was a home.

Things went on. They started warily but smoothly at first with Mrs. Bagley asking almost incessantly whether Mr. Maxwell would approve of this or that and should she do this or the other and, phrased cleverly, indicated that she would take the word of young James for the time being but there would be evil sputterings in the fireplace if the programs approved by young James Holden were not wholly endorsed by Mr. Charles Maxwell.

At the end of the first week, supplies were beginning to run short and still there was no sign of any return of the missing Mr. Maxwell. With some misgiving, Mrs. Bagley broached the subject of shopping to James. The youngster favored Mrs. Bagley with another smile.

"Yes," he said calmly. "Just a minute." And he disappeared upstairs to fetch another envelope. Inside was a second letter which read:

My Dear Mrs. Bagley:

Attached you will find letters addressed to several of the local merchants in Shipmont, explaining your status as my housekeeper and directing them to honor your purchases against my accounts. Believe me, they recognize my signature despite the fact that they might not recognize me! There should be no difficulty. I'd suggest, however, that you start a savings account at the local bank with the enclosed salary check. You have no idea how much weight the local banker carries in his character-reference of folks with a savings account.

Otherwise, I trust things are pleasant.

Sincerely,
Charles Maxwell.

"Things," she mused aloud, "are pleasant enough."

James nodded. "Good," he said. "You're satisfied, then?"

Mrs. Bagley smiled at him wistfully. "As they go," she said, "I'm satisfied. Lord knows, you're no great bother, James, and I'll be most happy to tell Mr. Maxwell so when he returns."

James nodded. "You're not concerned over Maxwell, are you?"

She sobered. "Yes," she said in a whisper. "Yes, I am. I'm afraid that he'll change things, that he'll not approve of Martha, or the way dinner is made, or my habits in dishwashing or bedmaking or marketing or something that will—well, put me right in the role of a paid chambermaid, a servant, a menial with no more to say about the running of the house, once he returns."

James Holden hesitated, thought, then smiled.

"Mrs. Bagley," he said apologetically, "I've thrown you a lot of curves. I hope you won't mind one more."

The woman frowned. James said hurriedly, "Oh, it's nothing bad, believe me. I mean—Well, you'll have to judge for yourself.

"You see, Mrs. Bagley," he said earnestly, "there isn't any Charles Maxwell."

---

Janet Bagley, with the look of a stricken animal, sat down heavily. There were two thoughts suddenly in her mind: Now I've got to leave, and, But I can't leave.

She sat looking at the boy, trying to make sense of what he had said. Mrs. Bagley was a young woman, but she had lived a demanding and unrelenting life; her husband dead, her finances calamitous, a baby to feed and raise ... there had been enough trouble in her life and she sought no more.

But she was also a woman of some strength of character.

Janet Bagley had not been able to afford much joy, but when things were at their worst she had not wept. She had been calm. She had taken what inexpensive pleasures she could secure—the health of her daughter, the strength of her arms to earn a living, the cunning of her mind to make a dollar do the work of five. She had learned that there was no bargain that was not worth investigating; the shoddiest goods were worth owning at a price; the least attractive prospect had to be faced and understood, for any commodity becomes a bargain when the price is right. There was no room for laziness or indulgence in her life. There was also no room for panic.

So Janet Bagley thought for a moment, and then said: "Tell me what you're talking about, James."

James Holden said immediately: "I am Charles Maxwell. That is, 'Charles Maxwell' is a pen name. He has no other existence."

"But—"

"But it's true, Mrs. Bagley," the boy said earnestly. "I'm only eight years old, but I happen to be earning my own living—as a writer, under the name of, among others, Charles Maxwell. Perhaps you've looked up some of the 'Charles Maxwell' books? If so, you may have seen some of the book reviews that were quoted on the jackets—I remember one that said that Charles Maxwell writes as though he himself were a boy, with the education of an adult. Well, that's the fact of the case."

Mrs. Bagley said slowly, "But I did look Mr. Max—I mean, I did look you up. There was a complete biographical sketch in Woman's Life. Thirty-one years old, I remember."

"I know. I wrote it. It too was fiction."

"You wrote—but why?"

"Because I was asked to write it," said James.

"But, well—what I mean, is—Just who is Mr. Maxwell? The man at the station said something about a hermit, but—"

"The Hermit of Martin's Hill is a convenient character carefully prepared to explain what might have looked like a very odd household," said James Holden. "Charles Maxwell, the Hermit, does not exist except in the minds of the neighbors and the editors of several magazines, and of course, the readers of those pages."

"But he wrote me himself." The bewildered woman paused.

"That's right, Mrs. Bagley. There's absolutely nothing illegal about a writer's using a pen name. Absolutely nothing. Some writers become so well-known by their pseudonym that they answer when someone calls them. So long as the writer isn't wanted by the F.B.I. for some heinous crime, and so long as he can unscramble the gobbledygook on Form 1040, stay out of trouble, pay his rent, and make his regular contributions to Social Security, nobody cares what name he uses."

"But where are your parents? Have you no friends? No legal guardian? Who handles your business affairs?"

James said in a flat tone of recital, "My parents are dead. What friends and family I have, want to turn me over to my legal guardian. My legal guardian is the murderer of my parents and the would-have-been murderer of me if I hadn't been lucky. Someday I shall prove it. And I handle my affairs myself, by mail, as you well know. I placed the advertisement, wrote the letters of reply, wrote those letters that answered specific questions and asked others, and I wrote the check that you cashed in order to buy your railroad ticket, Mrs. Bagley. No, don't worry. It's good."

Mrs. Bagley tried to digest all that and failed. She returned to the central point. "But you're a minor—"

"I am," admitted James Holden. "But you accepted my checks, your bank accepted my checks, and they've been honored by the clearing houses. My own bank has been accepting them for a couple of years now. It will continue to be that way until something goes wrong and I'm found out. I'm taking every precaution that nothing goes wrong."

"Still—"

"Mrs. Bagley, look at me. I am precisely what I seem to be. I am a young male human being, eight years old, possessed of a good command of the English language and an education superior to the schooling of any high-school graduate. It is true that I am an infant in the eyes of the law, so I have not the right to hold the ear of the law long enough to explain my competence."

"But—"

"Listen a moment," insisted James. "You can't hope to hear it all in one short afternoon. It may take weeks before you fully understand."

"You assume that I'll stay, then?"

James smiled. Not the wide open, simple smile of youth but the knowing smile of someone pleased with the success of his own plans. "Mrs. Bagley, of the many replies to my advertisement, yours was selected because you are in a near-desperate position. My advertisement must have sounded tailor-made to fit your case; a young widow to work as resident housekeeper, child of preschool or early school age welcome. Well, Mrs. Bagley, your qualifications are tailor-made for me, too. You are in need, and I can give you what you need—a living salary, a home for you and your daughter, and for your daughter an education that will far transcend any that you could ever provide for her."

"And how do you intend to make that come to pass?"

"Mrs. Bagley, at the present time there are only two people alive who know the answer to that question. I am one of them. The other is my so-called legal 'guardian' who would be most happy to guard me right out of my real secret. You will be the third person alive to know that my mother and father built a machine that produces the same deeply-inlaid memory-track of information as many months of learning-by-repetition. With that machine, I absorbed the information available to a high-school student before I was five. I am rebuilding that machine now from plans and specifications drilled into my brain by my father. When it is complete, I intend to become the best informed person in the world."

"That isn't right," breathed Mrs. Bagley.

"Isn't it?" asked James seriously. "Isn't it right? Is it wrong, when at the present time it takes a man until he is almost thirty years old before he can say that his education is complete?"

"Well, I suppose you're right."

James eyed Mrs. Bagley carefully. He said softly, "Mrs. Bagley, tell me, would you give Martha a college education if you had—or will you if you have at the time—the wherewithal to provide it?"

"Of course."

"You have it here," said James. "So long as you stay to protect it."

"But won't it make—?" her voice trailed away uncertainly.

"A little intellectual monster out of her?" laughed the boy. "Maybe. Maybe I am, too. On the other hand it might make a brilliant woman out of her. She might be a doctor if she has the capacity of a brilliant doctor. My father's machine is no monster-maker, Mrs. Bagley. With it a person could memorize the Britannica. And from the Britannica that person would learn that there is much good in the world and also that there is rich reward for being a part of that capacity for good."

"I seem to have been outmaneuvered," said Mrs. Bagley with a worried frown.

James smiled. "Not at all," he said. "It was just a matter of finding someone who wanted desperately to have what I wanted to give, and of course overcoming the natural adult reluctance to admit that anybody my size and age can operate on grown-up terms."

"You sound so sure of yourself."

"I am sure of myself. And one of the more important things in life is to understand one's limitations."

"But couldn't you convince them—?"

"One—you—I can convince. Maybe another, later. But if I tackle the great American public, I'm licked by statistics. My guess is that there is one brand-new United States citizen born every ten seconds. It takes me longer than ten seconds to convince someone, that I know what I'm talking about. But so long as I have an accepted adult out front, running the store, I don't have to do anything but sit backstage, run the hidden strings, and wait until my period of growth provides me with a stature that won't demand any explanation."

From the playroom, Martha came running. "Mummy! Mummy!" she cried in a shrill voice filled with the strident tones of alarm, "Dolly's sick and I can't leave her!"

Mrs. Bagley folded her daughter in her arms. "We won't leave," she said. "We're staying."

James Holden nodded with satisfaction, but one thing he realized then and there: He simply had to rush the completion of his father's machine.

He could not stand the simpering prattle of Martha Bagley's playgames.

---

CHAPTER EIGHT

The arrival of Mrs. Bagley changed James Holden's way of life far more than he'd expected. His basic idea had been to free himself from the hours of dishwashing, bedmaking, dusting, cleaning and straightening and from the irking chore of planning his meals far enough ahead to obtain sustenance either through mail or carried note. He gave up his haphazard chores readily. Mrs. Bagley's menus often served him dishes that he wouldn't have given house-room; but he also enjoyed many meals that he could not or would not have taken the time to prepare.

He did have some faint notion that being freed from the household toil would allow him sixteen or eighteen hours at the typewriter, but he was not greatly dismayed to find that this did not work.

When he wrote himself out, he relaxed by reading, or sitting quietly planning his next piece. Even that did not fill his entire day. To take some advantage of his time, James began to indulge in talk-fests with Mrs. Bagley.

These were informative. He was learning from her how the outside world was run, from one who had no close association with his own former life. Mrs. Bagley was by no means well-informed on all sides of life, but she did have her opinions and her experiences and a fair idea of how things went on in her own level. And, of course, James had made this choice because of the girl. He wanted a companion of his own age. Regardless of what Mrs. Bagley really thought of this matter of rapid education, James proposed to use it on Martha. That would give him a companion of his own like, they would come closer to understanding one another than he could ever hope to find understanding elsewhere.

So he talked and played with Martha in his moments of relaxation. And he found her grasp of life completely unreal.

James could not get through to her. He could not make her stop play-acting in everything that she did not ignore completely. It worried him.

With the arrival of summer, James and Martha played outside in the fresh air. They made a few shopping excursions into town, walking the mile and more by taking their time, and returning with their shopping load in the station-master's taxicab mail car. But on these expeditions, James hung close to Martha lest her babbling prattle start an unwelcome line of thought. She never did it, but James was forever on edge.

This source of possible danger drove him hard. The machine that was growing in a mare's-nest on the second floor began to evolve faster.

James Holden's work was a strangely crude efficiency. The prototype had been built by his father bit by bit and step by step as its design demanded. Sections were added as needed, and other sections believed needed were abandoned as the research showed them unnecessary. Louis Holden had been a fine instrumentation engineer, but his first models were hay-wired in the breadboard form. James copied his father's work—including his father's casual breadboard style. And he added some inefficiencies of his own.

Furthermore, James was not strong enough to lift the heavier assemblies into place. James parked the parts wherever they would sit.

To Mrs. Bagley, the whole thing was bizarre and unreasonable. Given her opinion, with no other evidence, she would have rejected the idea at once. She simply did not understand anything of a technical nature.

One day she bluntly asked him how he knew what he was doing.

James grinned. "I really don't know what I'm doing," he admitted. "I'm only following some very explicit directions. If I knew the pure theory of my father's machine I could not design the instrumentation that would make it work. But I can build a reproduction of my father's machine from the directions."

"How can that be?"

James stopped working and sat on a packing case. "If you bought a lawn-mower," he said, "it might come neatly packed in a little box with all the parts nested in cardboard formers and all the little nuts and bolts packed in a bag. There would be a set of assembly directions, written in such a way as to explain to anybody who can read that Part A is fastened to Bracket B using Bolt C, Lockwasher D, and Nut E. My father's one and only recognition of the dangers of the unforeseeable future was to drill deep in my brain these directions. For instance," and he pointed to a boxed device, "that thing is an infra-low frequency amplifier. Now, I haven't much more than a faint glimmer of what the thing is and how it differs from a standard amplifier, but I know that it must be built precisely thus-and-so, and finally it must be fitted into the machine per instructions. Look, Mrs. Bagley." James picked up a recently-received package, swept a place clear on the packing case and dumped it out. It disgorged several paper bags of parts, some large plates and a box. He handed her a booklet. "Try it yourself," he said. "That's a piece of test equipment made in kit form by a commercial outfit in Michigan. Follow those directions and build it for me."

"But I don't know anything about this sort of thing."

"You can read," said James with a complete lack of respect. He turned back to his own work, leaving Mrs. Bagley leafing her way through the assembly manual.

To the woman it was meaningless. But as she read, a secondary thought rose in her mind. James was building this devilish-looking nightmare, and he had every intention of using it on her daughter! She accepted without understanding the fact that James Holden's superior education had come of such a machine—but it had been a machine built by a competent mechanic. She stole a look at James. The anomaly puzzled her.

When the lad talked, his size and even the thin boyish voice were negated by the intelligence of his words, the size of his vocabulary, the clarity of his statements. Now that he was silent, he became no more than an eight-year-old lad who could not possibly be doing anything constructive with this mad array of equipment. The messiness of the place merely made the madness of the whole program seem worse.

But she turned back to her booklet. Maybe James was right. If she could assemble this doodad without knowing the first principle of its operation, without even knowing from the name what the thing did, then she might be willing to admit that—messy as it looked—the machine could be reconstructed.

Trapped by her own interest, Mrs. Bagley pitched in.

They took a week off to rearrange the place. They built wooden shelves to hold the parts in better order. These were by no means the work of a carpenter, for Mrs. Bagley's aim with a saw was haphazard, and her batting average with a hammer was about .470; but James lacked the strength, so the construction job was hers. Crude as it was, the place looked less like a junkshop when they were done. Work resumed on the assembly of the educator.

Of course the writing suffered.

The budget ran low. James was forced to abandon the project for his typewriter. He drove himself hard, fretting and worrying himself into a stew time after time. And then as August approached, Nature stepped in to add more disorder.

James entered a "period of growth." In three weeks he gained two inches.

His muscles, his bones and his nervous system ceased to coordinate. He became clumsy. His handwriting underwent a change, so severe that James had to practically forge his own signature of Charles Maxwell. To avoid trouble he stopped the practice of writing individual checks for the bills and transferred a block sum of money to an operating account in Mrs. Bagley's name.

His fine regimen went to pieces.

He embarked on a haphazard program of sleeping, eating and working at odd hours, and his appetite became positively voracious. He wanted what he wanted when he wanted it, even if it were the middle of the night. He pouted and groused when he didn't get it. In calmer moments he hated himself for these tantrums, but no amount of self-rationalization stopped them.

During this period, James was by no means an efficient youngster. His writing suffered the ills of both his period of growth and his upset state of mind. His fingers failed to coordinate on his typewriter and his manuscript copy turned out rough, with strikeovers, xxx-outs, and gross mistakes. The pile of discarded paper massed higher than his finished copy until Mrs. Bagley took over and began to retype his rough script for him.

His state of mind remained chaotic.

Mrs. Bagley began to treat him with special care. She served him warm milk and insisted that he rest. Finally she asked him why he drove himself so hard.

"We are approaching the end of summer," he said, "and we are not prepared."

"Prepared for what?"

They were relaxing in the living room, James fretting and Mrs. Bagley seated, Martha Bagley asprawl on the floor turning the pages of a crayon-coloring book. "Look at us," he said. "I am a boy of eight, your daughter is a girl of seven. By careful dress and action I could pass for a child one year younger, but that would still make me seven. Last summer when I was seven, I passed for six."

"Yes, but—?"

"Mrs. Bagley, there are laws about compulsory education. Sooner or later someone is going to get very curious about us."

"What do you intend to do about it?"

"That's the problem," he said. "I don't really know. With a lot of concentrated effort I can probably enter school if I have to, and keep my education covered up. But Martha is another story."

"I don't see—?" Mrs. Bagley bit her lip.

"We can't permit her to attend school," said James.

"You shouldn't have advertised for a woman with a girl child!" said Mrs. Bagley.

"Perhaps not. But I wanted someone of my own age and size around so that we can grow together. I'm a bit of a misfit until I'm granted the right to use my education as I see fit."

"And you hope to make Martha another misfit?"

"If you care to put it that way," admitted James. "Someone has to start. Someday all kids will be educated with my machine and then there'll be no misfits."

"But until then—?"

"Mrs. Bagley, I am not worried about what is going to happen next year. I am worried about what is going to happen next month."

Mrs. Bagley sat and watched him for a moment. This boy was worried, she could see that. But assuming that any part of his story was true—and it was impossible to doubt it—he had ample cause.

The past years had given Mrs. Bagley a hard shell because it was useful for survival; to keep herself and her child alive she had had to be permanently alert for every threat. Clearly this was a threat. Martha was involved. Martha's future was, at the least, bound to be affected by what James did.

And the ties of blood and habit made Martha's future the first consideration in Janet Bagley's thoughts.

But not the only consideration; for there is an in-born trait in the human race which demands that any helpless child should be helped. James was hardly helpless; but he certainly was a child. It was easy to forget it, talking to him—until something came up that the child could not handle.

Mrs. Bagley sighed. In a different tone she asked, "What did you do last year?"

"Played with Rags on the lawn," James said promptly. "A boy and his dog is a perfectly normal sight—in the summer. Then, when school opened, I stayed in the house as much as I could. When I had to go out I tried to make myself look younger. Short pants, dirty face. I don't think I could get away with it this year."

"I think you're right," Mrs. Bagley admitted. "Well, suppose you could do what you wish this year? What would that be?"

James said: "I want to get my machine working. Then I want to use it on Martha."

"On Martha! But—"

James said patiently: "It won't hurt her, Mrs. Bagley. There isn't any other way. The first thing she needs is a good command of English."

"English?" Mrs. Bagley hesitated, and was lost. After all, what was wrong with the girl's learning proper speech?

"Martha is a child both physically and intellectually. She has been talked to about 'right' and 'wrong' and she knows that 'telling the truth' is right, but she doesn't recognize that talking about fairies is a misstatement of the truth. Question her carefully about how we live, and you'll get a fair approximation of the truth."

"So?"

"But suppose someone asks Martha about the Hermit of Martin's Hill?"

"What do you fear?"

"We might play upon her make-believe stronger than we have. She play-acts his existence very well. But suppose someone asks her what he eats, or where he gets his exercise, or some other personal question. She hasn't the command of logic to improvise a convincing background."

"But why should anybody ask such personal questions?" asked Mrs. Bagley.

James said patiently: "To ask personal questions of an adult is 'prying' and is therefore considered improper and antisocial. To ask the same questions of a child is proper and social. It indicates a polite interest in the world of the child. You and I, Mrs. Bagley, have a complete picture of the Hermit all prepared, and with our education we can improvise plausible answers. I've hoped to finish my machine early enough to provide Martha with the ability to do the same."

"So what can we do?"

"About the only thing we can do is to hide," said James. "Luckily, most of the business is conducted out of this place by mail. Write letters to some boarding school situated a good many miles from here. Ask the usual routine questions about entering a seven-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy for one semester. Robert Holmes, our postmaster-taxicab driver-station-master, reads everything that isn't sealed. He will read the addresses, and he will see replies and read their return address."

"And then we'll pretend to send you and Martha to boarding school?"

James nodded. "Confinement is going to be difficult, but in this climate the weather gets nasty early and that keeps people out of one another's hair."

"But this station-master business—?"

"We've got to pull some wool over Robert's eyes," said James. "Somehow, we've got to make it entirely plausible. You've got to take Martha and me away and come back alone just as if we were in school."

"We should have a car," said Mrs. Bagley.

"A car is one piece of hardware that I could never justify," said James. "Nor," he chuckled, "buy from a mail-order house because I couldn't accept delivery. I bought furniture from Sears and had it delivered according to mailed instructions. But I figured it better to have the folks in Shipmont wondering why Charles Maxwell didn't own a car than to have them puzzling why he owned one that never was used, nor even moved. Besides, a car—costs—"

Mrs. Bagley smiled with real satisfaction. "There," she said, "I think I can help. I can buy the car."

James was startled. "But can you afford it?"

Mrs. Bagley nodded seriously. "James," she said, "I've been scratching out an existence on hard terms and I've had to make sure of tomorrow. Even when things were worst, I tried to put something away—some weeks it was only a few pennies, sometimes nothing at all. But—well, I'm not afraid of tomorrow any more."

James was oddly pleased. While he was trying to find a way to say it, Mrs. Bagley relieved him of the necessity. "It won't be a brand-new convertible," she warned. "But they tell me you can get something that runs for two or three hundred dollars. Tim Fisher has some that look about right in his garage—and besides," she said, clinching it, "it gives me a chance to give out a little more Maxwell and boarding-school propaganda."

---

CHAPTER NINE

The letter was a masterpiece of dissembling. It suggested, without promising, that Charles Maxwell intended to send his young charge to boarding school along with his housekeeper's daughter. It asked the school's advice and explained the deformity that made Charles Maxwell a recluse. The reply could hardly have been better if they'd penned it themselves for the signature of the faculty advisor. It discussed the pros and cons of away-from-home schooling and went on at great length to discuss the attitude of children and their upbringing amid strange surroundings. It invited a long and inconclusive correspondence—just what James wanted.

The supposed departure for school went off neatly, no one in the town of Shipmont was surprised when Mrs. Bagley turned up buying an automobile of several years' vintage because this was a community where everybody had one.

The letters continued at the rate of one every two or three weeks. They were picked up by Mrs. Bagley who let it be known that these were progress reports. In reality, they were little tracts on the theory of child education. They kept up the correspondence for the information it contained, and also because Mrs. Bagley enjoyed this contact with an outer world that contained adults.

Meanwhile, James ended his spurt of growth and settled down. Work on his machine continued when he could afford to buy the parts, and his writing settled down into a comfortable channel once more. In his spare time James began to work on Martha's diction.

Martha could not have been called a retarded child. Her trouble was lack of constant parental attention during her early years. With father gone and mother struggling to live, Martha had never overcome some of the babytalk-diction faults. There was still a trace of the omitted 'B' here and there. 'Y' was a difficult sound; the color of a lemon was "Lellow." Martha's English construction still bore marks of the baby. "Do you have to—" came out as "Does you has to—?"

James Holden's father had struggled in just this way through his early experimental days, when he despaired of ever getting the infant James out of the baby-prattle stage. He could not force, he could not even coerce. All that his father could do was to watch quietly as baby James acquired the awareness of things. Then he could step in and supply the correct word-sound to name the object. In those early days the progress of James Holden was no greater than the progress of any other infant. Holden Senior followed the theory of ciphers; no cryptologist can start unravelling a secret message until he is aware of the fact that some hidden message exists. No infant can be taught a language until some awareness tells the tiny brain that there is some definite connection between sound and sight.

---

For the next few weeks James worked with Martha on her speech, and hated it. So slow, so dreary! But it was necessary, he thought, to keep her from establishing any more permanent errors, so that when the machine was ready there would be at least a blank slate to write on, not one all scribbled over with mistakes.

Time passed; the weather grew colder; the machine spread its scattered parts over his workroom.

Janet Bagley knew that the machine was growing, but it had not occurred to her that it would be finished. She had grown accustomed to her life on Martin's Hill. By her standards, it was easy. She made three meals each day, cleaned the rooms, hung curtains, sewed clothing for Martha and herself, did the shopping and had time enough left over to take excursions in her little car and keep her daughter out of mischief. It was pleasant. It was more than pleasant, it was safe.

And then the machine was finished.

Mrs. Bagley took a sandwich and a glass of milk to James and found him sitting on a chair, a heavy headset covering most of his skull, reading aloud from a textbook on electronic theory.

Mrs. Bagley stopped at the door, unaccountably startled.

James looked up and shut off his work. "It's finished," he said with grave pride.

"All of it?"

"Well," he said, pondering, "the basic part. It works."

Mrs. Bagley looked at the scramble of equipment in the room as though it were an enemy. It didn't look finished. It didn't even look safe. But she trusted James, although she felt at that moment that she would grow old and die before she understood why and how any collection of apparatus could be functional and still be so untidy. "It—could teach me?"

"If you had something you want to memorize."

"I'd like to memorize some of the pet recipes from my cookbook."

"Get it," directed James.

She hesitated. "How does it work?" she wanted to know first.

He countered with another question. "How do we memorize anything?"

She thought. "Why, by repeating and repeating and rehearsing and rehearsing."

"Yes," said James. "So this device does the repetition for you. Electromechanically."

"But how?"

James smiled wistfully. "I can give you only a thumbnail sketch," he said, "until I have had time to study the subjects that lead up to the final theory."

"Goodness," exclaimed Mrs. Bagley, "all I want is a brief idea. I wouldn't understand the principles at all."

"Well, then, my mother, as a cerebral surgeon, knew the anatomy of the human brain. My father, as an instrument-maker, designed and built encephalographs. Together, they discovered that if the great waves of the brain were filtered down and the extremely minute waves that ride on top of them were amplified, the pattern of these superfine waves went through convolutions peculiar to certain thoughts. Continued research refined their discovery.

"Now, the general theory is that the cells of the brain act sort of like a binary digital computer, with certain banks of cells operating to store sufficient bits of information to furnish a complete memory. In the process of memorization, individual cells become activated and linked by the constant repetition.

"Second, the brain within the skull is a prisoner, connected to the 'outside' by the five standard sensory channels of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Stimulate a channel, and the result is a certain wave-shape of electrical impulse that enters the brain and—sort of like the key to a Yale lock—fits only one combination of cells. Or if no previous memory is there, it starts its own new collection of cells to linking and combining. When we repeat and repeat, we are deepening the groove, so to speak.

"Finally comes the Holden Machine. The helmet makes contact with the skull in those spots where the probes of the encephalograph are placed. When the brain is stimulated into thought, the brain waves are monitored and recorded, amplified, and then fed back to the same brain-spots. Not once, but multifold, like the vibration of a reed or violin string. The circuit that accepts signals, amplifies them, returns them to the same set of terminals, and causes them to be repeated several hundred times per millisecond without actually ringing or oscillating is the real research secret of the machine. My father's secret and now mine."

"And how do we use it?"

"You want to memorize a list of ingredients," said James. "So you will put this helmet on your head with the cookbook in your hands. You will turn on the machine when you have read the part you want to memorize just to be sure of your material. Then, with the machine running, you carefully read aloud the passage from your book. The vibrating amplifier in the machine monitors and records each electrical impulse, then furnishes it back to your brain as a successive series of repetitious vibrations, each identical in shape and magnitude, just as if you had actually read and re-read that list of stuff time and again."

"And then I'll know it cold?"

James shook his head. "Then you'll be about as confused as you've ever been. For several hours, none of it will make sense. You'll be thinking things like a 'cup of salt and a pinch of water,' or maybe, 'sugar three of mustard and two spoonthree teas.' And then in a few hours all of this mish-mash will settle itself down into the proper serial arrangement; it will fit the rest of your brain-memory-pattern comfortably."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It has something to do with the same effect one gets out of studying. On Tuesday one can read a page of textbook and not grasp a word of it. Successive readings help only a little. Then in about a week it all becomes quite clear, just as if the brain had sorted it and filed it logically among the other bits of information. Well, what about that cookbook?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Bagley, with the air of someone agreeing to have a tooth pulled when it hasn't really started to hurt, "I'll get it."

---

James Holden allowed himself a few pleasant daydreams. The most satisfactory of all was one of himself pleading his own case before the black-robed Justices of the Supreme Court, demolishing his detractors with a flow of his brilliance and convincing them beyond any doubt that he did indeed have the right to walk alone. That there be no question of his intellect, James proposed to use his machine to educate himself to completion. He would be the supreme student of the arts and the sciences, of law, language, and literature. He would know history and the humanities, and the dreams and aims of the great philosophers and statesmen, and he would even be able to quote in their own terms the drives of the great dictators and some of the evil men so that he could draw and compare to show that he knew the difference between good and bad.

But James Holden had no intention of sharing this limelight.

His superb brilliance was to be compared to the average man's, not to another one like him. He had the head start. He intended to keep it until he had succeeded in compelling the whole world to accept him with the full status of a free adult.

Then, under his guidance, he would permit the world-wide use of his machine.

His loneliness had forced him to revise that dream by the addition of Martha Bagley; he needed a companion, contemporary, and foil. His mental playlet no longer closed with James Holden standing alone before the Bench. Now it ended with Martha saying proudly, "James, I knew you could do it."

Martha Bagley's brilliance would not conflict with his. He could stay ahead of her forever. But he had no intention of allowing some experienced adult to partake of this program of enforced education. He was, therefore, going to find himself some manner or means of preventing Mrs. Bagley from running the gamut of all available information.

James Holden evaluated all people in his own terms, he believed that everybody was just as eager for knowledge as he was.

So he was surprised to find that Mrs. Bagley's desire for extended education only included such information as would make her own immediate personal problems easier. Mrs. Bagley was the first one of the mass of people James was destined to meet who not only did not know how or why things worked, but further had no intention whatsoever of finding out.

Instead of trying to monopolize James Holden's machine, Mrs. Bagley was satisfied to learn a number of her pet recipes. After a day of thought she added her social security number, blood type, some birthdays, dates, a few telephone numbers and her multiplication tables. She announced that she was satisfied. It solved James Holden's problem—and stunned him completely.

But James had very little time to worry about Mrs. Bagley's attitude. He found his hands full with Martha.

Martha played fey. Her actions and attitude baffled James, and even confused her mother. There was no way of really determining whether the girl was scared to death of the machine itself, or whether she simply decided to be difficult. And she uttered the proper replies with all of the promptness—and intelligence—of a ventriloquist's dummy:

"You don't want to be ignorant, do you?"

"No."

"You want to be smart, like James, don't you?"

"Yes."

"You know the machine won't hurt, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Then let's try it just once, please?"

"No."

Back to the beginning again. Martha would agree to absolutely anything except the educator.

Leaving the argument to Mrs. Bagley, James sat down angrily with a book. He was so completely frustrated that he couldn't read, but he sat there leafing the pages slowly and making a determined show of not lifting his head.

Mrs. Bagley went on for another hour before she reached the end of her own patience. She stood up almost rigid with anger. James never knew how close Mrs. Bagley was to making use of a hairbrush on her daughter's bottom. But Mrs. Bagley also realized that Martha had to go into this process willing to cooperate. So, instead of physical punishment, she issued a dictum:

"You'll go to your room and stay there until you're willing!"

And at that point Martha ceased being stubborn and began playing games.

She permitted herself to be led to the chair, and then went through a routine of skittishness, turning her head and squirming incessantly, which made it impossible for James to place the headset properly. This went on until he stalked away and sat down again. Immediately Martha sat like a statue. But as soon as James reached for the little screws that adjusted the electrodes, Martha started to giggle and squirm. He stalked away and sat through another session between Martha and her mother.

Late in the afternoon James succeeded in getting her to the machine; Martha uttered a sentence without punctuating it with little giggles, but it came as elided babytalk.

"Again," he commanded.

"I don't wan' to."

"Again!" he snapped.

Martha began to cry.

That, to James, was the end. But Mrs. Bagley stepped forward with a commanding wave for James to vacate the premises and took over. James could not analyze her expression, but it did look as if it held relief. He left the room to them; a half hour later Mrs. Bagley called him back.

"She's had it," said Mrs. Bagley. "Now you can start, I think."

James looked dubious; but said, "Read this."

"Martha?"

Martha took a deep breath and said, nicely, "'A' is the first letter of the English Alphabet."

"Good." He pressed the button. "Again? Please?"

Martha recited it nicely.

"Fine," he said. "Now we'll look up 'Is' and go on from there."

"My goodness," said Mrs. Bagley, "this is going to take months."

"Not at all," said James. "It just goes slowly at the start. Most of the definitions use the same words over and over again. Martha really knows most of these simple words, we've just got to be dead certain that her own definition of them agrees wholly and completely with ours. After a couple of hours of this minute detail, we'll be skipping over everything but new words. After all, she only has to work them over once, and as we find them, we'll mark them out of the book. Ready, Martha?"

"Can't read it."

James took the little dictionary. "Um," he said. "Hadn't occurred to me."

"What?" asked Mrs. Bagley.

"This thing says, Three-rd pers period sing periodic indic period of Be,' the last in heavy bold type. Can't have Martha talking in abbreviations," he chuckled. He went to the typewriter and wrote it out fully. "Now read that," he directed.

She did and again the process went through without a hitch. Slowly, but surely, they progressed for almost two hours before Martha rebelled. James stopped, satisfied with the beginning.

But as time wore on into the late autumn, Martha slowly—oh, so slowly!—began to realize that there was importance to getting things right. She continued to tease. But she did her teasing before James closed the "Run" button.

---

CHAPTER TEN

Once James progressed Martha through the little dictionary, he began with a book of grammar. Again it started slowly; he had to spend quite a bit of time explaining to Martha that she did indeed know all of the terms used in the book of grammar because they'd all been defined by the dictionary, now she was going to learn how the terms and their definitions were used.

James was on more familiar ground now. James, like Martha, had learned his first halting sentence structure by mimicking his parents, but he remembered the process of learning why and how sentences are constructed according to the rules, and how the rules are used rather than intuition in forming sentences.

Grammar was a topic that could not be taken in snippets and bits. Whole paragraphs had to be read until Martha could read them without a halt or a mispronunciation, and then committed to memory with the "Run" button held down. At the best it was a boring process, even though it took only minutes instead of days. It was not conflicting, but it was confusing. It installed permanently certain solid blocks of information that were isolated; they stood alone until later blocks came in to connect them into a whole area.

Each session was numbing. Martha could take no more than a couple of hours, after which her reading became foggy. She wanted a nap after each session and even after the nap she went around in a bemused state of mental dizziness.

Life settled down once more in the House on Martin's Hill. James worked with the machine himself and laid out lessons to guide Martha. Then, finished for the day with education, James took to his typewriter while Martha had her nap. It filled the days of the boy and girl completely.

This made an unexpected and pleasant change in Mrs. Bagley's routine. It had been a job to keep Martha occupied. Now that Martha was busy, Mrs. Bagley found time on her own hands; without interruption, her housework routine was completed quite early in the afternoon.

Mrs. Bagley had never made any great point of getting dressed for dinner. She accumulated a collection of house-frocks; printed cotton washables differing somewhat in color and cut but functionally identical. She wore them serially as they came from the row of hangers in her closet.

Now she began to acquire some dressier things, wearing them even during her shopping trips.

James paid little attention to this change in his housekeeper's routine, but he approved. Mrs. Bagley was also taking more pains with the 'do' of her hair, but the boy's notice was not detailed enough to take a part-by-section inventory of the whole. In fact, James gave the whole matter very little thought until Mrs. Bagley made a second change after her return from town, appearing for dinner in what James could only classify as a party dress.

She asked, "James, do you mind if I go out this evening?"

James, startled, shrugged and said, "No, I guess not."

"You'll keep an ear out for Martha?"

The need for watching a sleeping girl of seven and a half did not penetrate. "What's up?" he asked.

"It's been months since I saw a movie."

James shrugged again, puzzled. "You saw the 'Bride of Frankenstein' last night on TV," he pointed out.

"I first saw that old horror when I was about your age," she told him with a trace of disdain.

"I liked it."

"So did I at eight and a half. But tonight I'm going to see a new picture."

"Okay," said James, wondering why anybody in their right mind would go out on a chilly night late in November just to see a moving picture when they could stay at home and watch one in comfort. "Have a good time."

He expected Mrs. Bagley to take off in her car, but she did not. She waited until a brief toot! came from the road. Then, with a swirl of motion, she left.

It took James Holden's limited experience some little time to identify the event with some similar scenes from books he'd read; even with him, reading about it was one world and seeing it happen was another thing entirely.

For James Holden it opened a new area for contemplation. He would have to know something about this matter if he hoped to achieve his dreamed-of status as an adult.

---

Information about the relation between man and woman had not been included in the course of education devised by his father and mother. Therefore his physical age and his information on the delicate subject were approximately parallel.

His personal evaluation of the subject was uncomplicated. At some age not much greater than his own, boys and girls conglomerated in a mass that milled around in a constant state of flux and motion, like individual atoms of gas compressed in a container. Meetings and encounters took place both singly and in groups until nearly everybody had been in touch with almost everybody else. Slowly the amorphous mass changed. Groups became attracted by mutual interests. Changes and exchanges took place, and then a pair-formation began to take place. The pair-formation went through its interchanges both with and without friction as the settling-down process proceeded. At times predictable by comparing it to the statistics of radioactivity, the pair-production resulted in permanent combination, which effectively removed this couple from free circulation.

James Holden had no grasp or feeling for the great catalyst that causes this pair-production; he saw it only for its sheer mechanics. To him, the sensible way to go about this matter was to get there early and move fast, because one stands to make a better choice when there is a greater number of unattached specimens from which to choose. Those left over are likely to have flaws.

And so he pondered, long after Martha had gone to bed.

He was still up and waiting when he heard the car stop at the gate. He watched them come up the walk arm in arm, their stride slow and lingering. They paused for several moments on the doorstep, once there was a short, muted laugh. The snick of the key came next and they came into the hallway.

"No, please don't come in," said Mrs. Bagley.

"But—" replied the man.

"But me no buts. It's late, Tim."

Tim? Tim? That would probably be Timothy Fisher. He ran the local garage where Mrs. Bagley bought her car. James went on listening shamelessly.

"Late? Phooey. When is eleven-thirty late?"

"When it's right now," she replied with a light laugh. "Now, Tim. It's been very—"

There came a long silence.

Her voice was throaty when the silence broke. "Now, will you go?"

"Of course," he said.

"Not that way, silly," she said. "The door's behind you."

"Isn't the door I want," he chuckled.

"We're making enough noise to wake the dead," she complained.

"Then let's stop talking," he told her.

There was another long silence.

"Now please go."

"Can I come back tomorrow night?"

"Not tomorrow."

"Friday?"

"Saturday."

"It's a date, then."

"All right. Now get along with you."

"You're cruel and heartless, Janet," he complained. "Sending a man out in that cold and storm."

"It isn't storming, and you've a fine heater in that car of yours."

"I'd rather have you."

"Do you tell that to all the girls?"

"Sure. Even Maggie the Washerwoman is better than an old car heater."

Mrs. Bagley chuckled throatily. "How is Maggie?"

"She's fine."

"I mean as a date."

"Better than the car heater."

"Tim, you're a fool."

"When I was a kid," said Tim reflectively, "there used to be a female siren in the movies. Her pet line used to be 'Kiss me, my fool!' Theda Bara, I think. Before talkies. Now—"

"No, Tim—"

Another long silence.

"Now, Tim, you've simply got to go!"

"Yeah, I know. You've convinced me."

"Then why aren't you going?"

He chuckled. "Look, you've convinced me. I can't stay so I'll go, obviously. But now that we've covered this problem, let's drop the subject for a while, huh?"

"Don't spoil a fine evening, Tim."

"Janet, what's with you, anyway?"

"What do you mean, 'what's with me?'"

"Just this. Somewhere up in the house is this oddball Maxwell who hides out all the time. He's either asleep or busy. Anyway, he isn't here. Do you have to report in, punch a time clock, tuck him in—or do you turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of twelve?"

"Mr. Maxwell is paying me wages to keep house for him. That's all. Part of my wages is my keep. But it doesn't entitle me to have full run of the house or to bring guests in at midnight for a two-hour good-night session."

"I'd like to tell this bird a thing or two," said Tim Fisher sharply. "He can't keep you cooped up like—like—"

"Nobody is keeping me cooped up," she said. "Like what?"

"What?"

"You said 'like—'"

"Skip it. What I meant is that you can't moulder, Janet. You've got to get out and meet people."

"I've been out and I've met people. I've met you."

"All to the good."

"Fine. So you invited me out, and I went. It was fun. I liked it. You've asked me, and I've said that I'd like to do it again on Saturday. I've enjoyed being kissed, and I'll probably enjoy it again on Saturday. So—"

"I'd think you'd enjoy a lot of it."

"Because my husband has been gone for five years?"

"Oh, now Janet—"

"That's what you meant, isn't it?"

"No. You've got me wrong."

"Tim, stop it. You're spoiling a fine evening. You should have gone before it started to spoil. Now please put your smile on again and leave cheerfully. There's always Saturday—if you still want it."

"I'll call you," he said.

The door opened once more and then closed. James took a deep breath, and then stole away quietly to his own room.

By some instinct he knew that this was no time to intercept Mrs. Bagley with a lot of fool questions.

---

To the surprise and puzzlement of young James Quincy Holden, Mr. Timothy Fisher telephoned early upon the following evening. He was greeted quite cordially by Mrs. Bagley. Their conversation was rambling and inane, especially when heard from one end only, and it took them almost ten minutes to confirm their Saturday night date. That came as another shock.

Well, not quite. The explanation bothered him even more than the fact itself. As a further extension of his little mechanical mating process, James had to find a place for the like of Jake Caslow and the women Jake knew. None of them were classed in the desirable group, all of them were among the leftovers. But of course, since none of them were good enough for the 'good' people, they were good enough for one another, and that made it all right—for them.

But Mrs. Bagley was not of their ilk. It was not right that she should be forced to take a leftover.

And then it occurred to him that perhaps Mrs. Bagley was not really taking the leftover, Tim Fisher, but instead was using Tim Fisher's company as a means toward meeting a larger group, from which there might be a better specimen. So he bided his time, thinking deeply around the subject, about which he knew nothing whatsoever.

Saturday night was a repeat of Wednesday. They stayed out later, and upon their return they took possession of the living room for at least an hour before they started their routine about the going-home process. With minor variations in the dialog, and with longer and more frequent silences, it almost followed the Wednesday night script. The variation puzzled James even more. This session went according to program for a while until Tim Fisher admitted with regret that it was, indeed, time for him to depart. At which juncture Mrs. Bagley did not leap to her feet to accept his offer to do that which she had been asking him to do for a half hour. Mrs. Bagley compounded the affair by sighing deeply and agreeing with him that it was a shame that it was so late and that she, too, wished that he could stay a little longer. This, of course, put them precisely where they were a half hour earlier and they had to start the silly business all over again.

They parted after a final fifteen-minute discussion at the front door. This discussion covered Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and finally came to agreement on Wednesday.

And so James Holden went to bed that night fully convinced that in a town of approximately two thousand people—he did not count the two or three hundred A.E.C.-College group as part of the problem—there were entirely too few attractive leftovers from which Mrs. Bagley could choose.

But as this association grew, it puzzled him even more. For in his understanding, any person forced to accept a second-rate choice does so with an air of resignation, but not with a cheerful smile, a sparkle in the eyes, and two hours of primping.

James sought the answer in his books but they were the wrong volumes for reference of this subject. He considered the local Public Library only long enough to remember that it carried a few hundred books suitable for the A.E.C.-College crew and a thousand or so of second-hand culls donated by local citizens during cleanup campaigns. He resorted to buying books by mail through advertisements in newspapers and magazines and received a number of volumes of medical treatises, psychological texts, and a book on obstetrics that convinced him that baby-having was both rare and hazardous. He read By Love Possessed but he did not recognize the many forms of love portrayed by the author because the volume was not annotated with signs or provided with a road map, and he did not know it when he read about it.

He went through the Kinsey books and absorbed a lot of data and graphs and figures on human behavior that meant nothing to him. James was not even interested in the incidence of homosexuality among college students as compared to religious groups, or in the comparison between premarital experience and level of education. He knew the words and what the words meant as defined in other words. But they were only words and did not touch him where he lived.

So, because none of the texts bothered to explain why a woman says Yes, when she means No, nor why a woman will cling to a man's lapels and press herself against him and at the same time tell him he has to go home, James remained ignorant. He could have learned more from Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats, or Browning than from Kinsey, deLee, or the "Instructive book on Sex, forwarded under plain wrapper for $2.69 postpaid."

Luckily for James, he did not study any of his material via the medium of his father's machine or it would have made him sick. For he was not yet capable of understanding the single subject upon which more words have been expended in saying less than any other subject since the dawn of history.

His approach was academic, he could have been reading the definitive material on the life-cycle of the beetle insofar as any stir of his own blood was concerned.

From his study he did identify a couple of items. Tim Fisher obviously desired extramarital relations with Mrs. Bagley—or was it premarital relations? Probably both. Logic said that Mrs. Bagley, having already been married to Martha's father, could hardly enter into premarital relations, although Tim could, since he was a bachelor. But they wouldn't be premarital with Tim unless he followed through and married Mrs. Bagley. And so they must be extramarital. But whatever they were called, the Book said that there was about as much on one side as on the other.

With a mind mildly aware of the facts of life, distorted through the eyes of near-nine James Holden, he watched them and listened in.

As for Mrs. Bagley, she did not know that she was providing part of James Holden's extraliterary education. She enjoyed the company of Tim Fisher. Hesitantly, she asked James if she could have Tim for dinner one evening, and was a bit surprised at his immediate assent. They planned the evening, cleaned the lower part of the house of every trace of its current occupancy, and James and Martha hied themselves upstairs. Dinner went with candlelight and charcoal-broiled steak—and a tray taken aloft for "Mr. Maxwell" was consumed by James and Martha. The evening went smoothly. They listened to music and danced, they sat and talked. And James listened.

Tim was not the same man. He sat calm and comfortably on the low sofa with Mrs. Bagley's head on his shoulder, both of them pleasantly bemused by the dancing fireplace and with each other's company. He said, "Well, I'm glad this finally happened."

"What happened?" she replied in a murmur.

"Getting the invite for dinner."

"Might have been sooner, I suppose. Sorry."

"What took you so long?"

"Just being cautious, I guess."

He chuckled. "Cautious?"

"Uh-huh."

Tim laughed.

"What's so darned funny?"

"Women."

"Are we such a bunch of clowns?"

"Not clowns, Janet. Just funny."

"All right, genius. Explain that."

"A woman is a lovely creature who sends a man away so that he can't do what she wants him to do most of all."

"Uh-huh."

"She feeds him full of rare steak until he wants to crawl off in a corner like the family mutt and go to sleep. Once she gets him in a somnolent state, she drapes herself tastefully on his shoulder and gets soft and warm and willing."

Mrs. Bagley laughed throatily. "Just start getting active," she warned, "and you'll see how fast I can beat a hasty retreat."

"Janet, what is with you?"

"What do you mean?"

"What are you hiding?"

"Hiding?"

"Yes, confound it, hiding!" he said, his voice turning hard. "Just who is this Charles Maxwell character, anyway?"

"Tim, please—"

His voice lowered again. "Janet," he said softly, "you're asking me to trust you, and at the same time you're not trusting me."

"But I've nothing to hide."

"Oh, stop it. I'm no schoolboy, Janet. If you have nothing to hide, why are you acting as if you were sitting on the lid?"

"I still don't know what you're talking about."

"Your words say so, but your tone is the icy haughtiness that dares me, mere male that I am, to call your lie. I've a half-notion to stomp upstairs and confront your mysterious Maxwell—if he indeed exists."

"You mustn't. He'd—"

"He'd what? I've been in this house for hours day and night and now all evening. I've never heard a sound, not the creak of a floorboard, the slam of a door, the opening of a window, nor the distant gurgle of cool, clear water, gushing into plumbing. So you've been married. This I know. You have a daughter. This I accept. Your husband is dead. This happens to people every day; nice people, bad people, bright people, dull people. There was a young boy here last summer. Him I do not know, but you and your daughter I do know about. I've checked—"

"How dare you check—?"

"I damn well dare check anything and anybody I happen to be personally interested in," he stormed. "As a potential bed partner I wouldn't give a hoot who you were or what you were. But before I go to the point of dividing the rest of my life on an exclusive contract, I have the right to know what I'm splitting it with."

"You have no right—"

"Balderdash! I have as much right as anybody to look at the record. I grant you the same right to look up my family and my friends and the status of my bank account and my credit rating and my service record. Grant it? Hell, I couldn't stop you. Now, what's going on? Where is your daughter and where is that little boy? And where—if he exists—is this Charles Maxwell?"

---

James had heard enough. No matter which way this was going, it would end up wrong. He was proud of Mrs. Bagley's loyalty, but he knew that it was an increasing strain and could very well lead to complications that could not be explained away without the whole truth. He decided that the only thing to do was to put in his own oar and relieve Mrs. Bagley.

He walked in, yawning. He stood between them, facing Tim Fisher. Behind him, Mrs. Bagley cried, "Now see—you've awakened him!"

In a dry-throated voice, Tim said, "I thought he was away at school. Now, what's the story?"

"It isn't her story to tell," said James. "It's mine."

"Now see here—"

"Mr. Fisher, you can't learn anything by talking incessantly."

Tim Fisher took a step forward, his face dark, his intention to shake the truth out of somebody. James held up a hand. "Sit down a moment and listen," he ordered.

The sight of James and the words that this child was uttering stopped Tim Fisher. Puzzled, he nodded dumbly, found a chair, and sat on the front edge of it, poised.

"The whereabouts of Mr. Maxwell is his own business and none of yours. Your criticism is unfounded and your suspicions unworthy. But since you take the attitude that this is some of your business, we don't mind telling you that Mr. Maxwell is in New York on business."

Tim Fisher eyed the youngster. "I thought you were away at school," he repeated.

"I heard you the first time," said James. "Obviously, I am not. Why I am not is Mr. Maxwell's business, not yours. And by insisting that something is wrong here and demanding the truth, you have placed Mrs. Bagley in the awkward position of having to make a decision that divides her loyalties. She has had the complete trust of Mr. Maxwell for almost a year and a half. Now, tell me, Mr. Fisher, to whom shall she remain loyal?"

"That isn't the point—"

"Yes, it is the point, Mr. Fisher. It is exactly the point. You're asking Mrs. Bagley to tell you the details of her employer's business, which is unethical."

"How much have you heard?" demanded Fisher crossly.

"Enough, at least to know what you've been hammering at."

"Then you know that I've as much as said that there was some suspicion attached."

"Suspicion of what?"

"Well, why aren't you in school?"

"That's Mr. Maxwell's business."

"Let me tell you, youngster, it is more than your Mr. Maxwell's business. There are laws about education and he's breaking them."

James said patiently: "The law states that every child shall receive an adequate education. The precise wording I do not know, but it does provide for schooling outside of the state school system if the parent or guardian so prefers, and providing that such extraschool education is deemed adequate by the state. Can you say that I am not properly educated, Mr. Fisher?"

"Well, you'd hardly expect me to be an expert on the subject."

"Then I'd hardly expect you to pass judgment, either," said James pointedly.

"You're pretty—" Tim Fisher caught his tongue at the right moment. He felt his neck getting hot. It is hard enough to be told that you are off-base and that your behavior has been bad when an adult says the damning words. To hear the same words from a ten-year-old is unbearable. Right or wrong, the adult's position is to turn aside or shut the child up either by pulling rank or cuffing the young offender with an open hand. To have this upstart defend Mrs. Bagley, in whose presence he could hardly lash back, put Mr. Fisher in a very unhappy state of mind. He swallowed and then asked, lamely, "Why does he have to be so furtive?"

"What is your definition of 'furtive'?" asked James calmly. "Do you employ the same term to describe the operations of that combination College-A.E.C. installation on the other side of town?"

"That's secret—"

"Implying that atomic energy is secretly above-board, legal, and honorable, whereas Mr. Maxwell's—"

"But we know about atomic energy."

"Sure we do," jeered James, and the sound of his immature near-treble voice made the jeer very close to an insult. "We know all about atomic energy. Was the Manhattan Project called 'furtive' until Hiroshima gave the story away?"

"You're trying to put words in my mouth," objected Tim.

"No, I'm not. I'm merely trying to make you understand something important to everybody. You come in here and claim by the right of personal interest that we should be most willing to tell you our business. Then in the next breath you defend the installation over on the other side of town for their attitude in giving the bum's rush to people who try to ask questions about their business. Go read your Constitution, Mr. Fisher. It says there that I have as much right to defend my home against intruders as the A.E.C. has to defend their home against spies."

"But I'm not intruding."

James nodded his head gently. "Not," he said, "until you make the grave error of equating personal privacy with culpable guilt."

"I didn't mean that."

"You should learn to say what you mean," said James, "instead of trying to pry information out of someone who happens to be fond of you."

"Now see here," said Tim Fisher, "I happen to be fond of her too, you know. Doesn't that give me some rights?"

"Would you expect to know all of her business if she were your wife?"

"Of course."

"Suppose she were working in the A.E.C.-College?"

"Well, that—er—"

"Would be different?"

"Well, now—"

"I talked this right around in its circle for a purpose," said James. "Stop and think for a moment. Let's discuss me. Mr. Fisher, where would you place me in school?"

"Er—how old are you?"

"Nine," said James. "In April."

"Well, I'm not sure—"

"Exactly. Do you suppose that I could sit in a classroom among my nine-year-old contemporaries very long without being found out?"

"Er—no—I suppose not."

"Mr. Fisher, how long do you think I could remain a secret if I attended high school, sitting at a specially installed desk in a class among teenagers twice my size?"

"Not very long."

"Then remember that some secrets are so big that you have to have armed guards to keep them secret, and others are so easy to conceal that all you need is a rambling old house and a plausible façade."

"Why have you told me all this?"

"Because you have penetrated this far by your own effort, justified by your own personal emotions, and driven by an urge that is all-powerful if I am to believe the books I've read on the subject. You are told this much of the truth so that you won't go off half-cocked with a fine collection of rather dangerous untruths. Understand?"

"I'm beginning to."

"Well, whether Mrs. Bagley accepts your offer of marriage or not, remember one thing: If she were working for the A.E.C. you'd be proud of her, and you'd also be quite careful not to ask questions that would cause her embarrassment."

Tim Fisher looked at Mrs. Bagley. "Well?" he asked.

Mrs. Bagley looked bleak. "Please don't ask me until I've had a chance to discuss all of the angles with Mr. Maxwell, Tim."

"Maxwell, again."

"Tim," she said in a quiet voice, "remember—he's an employer, not an emotional involvement."

James Holden looked at Tim Fisher. "And if you'll promise to keep this thing as close a secret as you would some information about atomic energy, I'll go to bed and let you settle your personal problems in private. Good night!"

He left, reasonably satisfied that Tim Fisher would probably keep their secret for a time, at least. The hinted suggestion that this was as important a government project as the Atomic Energy Commission's works would prevent casual talk. There was also the slim likelihood that Tim Fisher might enjoy the position of being on the inside of a big secret, although this sort of inner superiority lacks true satisfaction. There was a more solid chance that Tim Fisher, being the ambitious man that he was, would keep their secret in the hope of acquiring for himself some of the superior knowledge and the advanced ability that went with it.

But James was certain that the program that had worked so well with Mrs. Bagley would fail with Tim Fisher. James had nothing material to offer Tim. Tim was the kind of man who would insist upon his wife being a full-time wife, physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

And James suddenly realized that Tim Fisher's own ambition and character would insist that Mrs. Bagley, with Martha, leave James Holden to take up residence in a home furnished by Tim Fisher upon the date and at time she became Mrs. Timothy Fisher.

He was still thinking about the complications this would cause when he heard Tim leave. His clock said three-thirty.

---

James Holden's mechanical educator was a wonderful machine, but there were some aspects of knowledge that it was not equipped to impart. The glandular comprehension of love was one such; there were others. In all of his hours under the machine James had not learned how personalities change and grow.

And yet there was a textbook case right before his eyes.

In a few months, Janet Bagley had changed from a frightened and belligerent mother-animal to a cheerful young prospective wife. The importance of the change lay in the fact that it was not polar, nothing reversed; it was only that the emphasis passed gradually from the protection of the young to the development of Janet Bagley herself.

James could not very well understand, though he tried, but he couldn't miss seeing it happen. It was worrisome. It threatened complications.

There was quite a change that came with Tim Fisher's elevation in status from steady date to affianced husband, heightened by Tim Fisher's partial understanding of the situation at Martin's Hill.

Then, having assumed the right to drop in as he pleased, he went on to assume more "rights" as Mrs. Bagley's fiancé. He brought in his friends from time to time. Not without warning, of course, for he understood the need for secrecy. When he brought friends it was after warning, and very frequently after he had helped them to remove the traces of juvenile occupancy from the lower part of the house.

In one way, this took some of the pressure off. The opening of the "hermit's" house to the friends of the "hermit's" housekeeper's fiancé and friends was a pleasant evidence of good will; people stopped wondering, a little.

On the other hand, James did not wholly approve. He contrasted this with what he remembered of his own home life. The guests who came to visit his mother and father were quiet and earnest. They indulged in animated discussions, argued points of deep reasoning, and in moments of relaxation they indulged in games that demanded skill and intellect.

Tim Fisher's friends were noisy and boisterous. They mixed highballs. They danced to music played so loud that it made the house throb. They watched the fights on television and argued with more volume than logic.

They were, to young James, a far cry from his parents' friends.

But, as he couldn't do anything about it, he refused to worry about it. James Holden turned his thoughts forward and began to plan how he was going to face the culmination of this romance next September Fifteenth. He even suspected that there would probably be a number of knotty little problems that he now knew nothing about; he resolved to allow some thinking-time to cope with them when, as, and if.

In the meantime, the summer was coming closer.

He prepared to make a visible show of having Mr. Charles Maxwell leave for a protracted summer travel. This would ease the growing problem of providing solid evidence of Maxwell's presence during the increasing frequency of Tim Fisher's visits and the widening circle of Mrs. Bagley's acquaintances in Shipmont. At the same time he and Martha would make a return from the Bolton School for Youth. This would allow them their freedom for the summer; for the first time James looked forward to it. Martha Bagley was progressing rapidly. This summer would see her over and done with the scatter-brain prattle that gave equal weight to fact or fancy. Her store of information was growing; she could be relied upon to maintain a fairly secure cover. Her logic was not to James Holden's complete satisfaction but she accepted most of his direction as necessary information to be acted upon now and reasoned later.

In the solving of his immediate problems, James can be forgiven for putting Paul Brennan out of his mind.

---

CHAPTER ELEVEN

But Paul Brennan was still alive, and he had not forgotten.

While James was, with astonishing success, building a life for himself in hiding, Brennan did everything he could to find him. That is to say, he did everything that—under the circumstances—he could afford to do.

The thing was, the boy had got clean away, without a trace.

When James escaped for the third, and very successful, time, Brennan was helpless. James had planned well. He had learned from his first two efforts. The first escape was a blind run toward a predictable objective; all right, that was a danger to be avoided. His second was entirely successful—until James created his own area of danger. Another lesson learned.

The third was planned with as much care as Napoleon's deliverance from the island.

James had started by choosing his time. He'd waited until Easter Week. He'd had a solid ten days during which he would be only one of countless thousands of children on the streets; there would be no slight suspicion because he was out when others were in.

---

James didn't go to school that day. That was common; children in the lower grades are often absent, and no one asks a question until they return, with the proper note from the parent. He was not missed anywhere until the school bus that should have dropped him off did not. This was an area of weakness that Brennan could not plug; he could hardly justify the effort of delivering and fetching the lad to and from school when the public school bus passed the Holden home. Brennan relied upon the Mitchells to see James upon the bus and to check him off when he returned. Whether James would have been missed earlier even with a personal delivery is problematical; certainly James would have had to concoct some other scheme to gain him his hours of free time.

At any rate, the first call to the school connected the Mitchells with a grumpy-voiced janitor who growled that teachers and principals had headed for their hills of freedom and wouldn't be back until Monday Week. It took some calling to locate a couple of James Holden's classmates who asserted that he hadn't been in school that day.

Paul Brennan knew at once what had happened, but he could not raise an immediate hue-and-cry. He fretted because of the Easter Week vacation; in any other time the sight of a school-aged boy free during school hours would have caused suspicion. During Easter Week vacation, every schoolboy would be free. James would also be protected by his size. A youngster walking alone is not suspect; his folks must be close by. The fact that it was "again" placed Paul Brennan in an undesirable position. This was not the youthful adventure that usually ends about three blocks from home. This was a repeat of the first absence during which James had been missing for months. People smile at the parents of the child who packs his little bag with a handkerchief and a candy bar to sally forth into the great big world, but it becomes another matter when the lad of six leaves home with every appearance of making it stick. So Brennan had to play it cozy, inviting newspaper reporters to the Holden home to display what he had to offer young James and giving them free rein to question Brennan's housekeeper and general factotum, the Mitchells. With honest-looking zeal, Paul Brennan succeeded in building up a picture that depicted James as ungrateful, hard to understand, wilful, and something of an intellectual brat.

Then the authorities proceeded to throw out a fine-mesh dragnet. They questioned and cross-questioned bus drivers and railroad men. They made contact with the local airport even though its facilities were only used for a daisy-cutting feeder line. Posters were printed and sent to all truck lines for display to the truck drivers. The roadside diners were covered thoroughly. And knowing the boy's ability to talk convincingly, the authorities even went so far as to try the awesome project of making contact with passengers bound out-of-town with young male children in tow.

Had James given them no previous experience to think about, he would have been merely considered a missing child and not a deliberate runaway. Then, instead of dragging down all of the known avenues of standard escape, the townspeople would have organized a tree-by-tree search of the fields and woods with hundreds of men walking hand in hand to inspect every square foot of the ground for either tracks or the child himself. But the modus operandi of young James Holden had been to apply sly touches such as writing letters and forging signatures of adults to cause the unquestioned sale of railroad tickets, or the unauthorized ride in the side-door Pullman.

Therefore, while the authorities were extending their circle of search based upon the velocity of modern transportation, James Holden was making his slow way across field and stream, guided by a Boy Scout compass and a U.S. Geodetic Survey map to keep him well out of the reach of roadway or town. With difficulty, but with dogged determination, he carried a light cot-blanket into which he had rolled four cans of pork and beans. He had a Boy Scout knife and a small pair of pliers to open it with. He had matches. He had the Boy Scout Handbook which was doubly useful; the pages devoted to woodsman's lore he kept for reference, the pages wasted on the qualifications for merit badges he used to start fires. He enjoyed sleeping in the open because it was spring and pleasantly warm, and because the Boy Scout Manual said that camping out was fun.

A grown man with an objective can cover thirty or forty miles per day without tiring. James made it ten to fifteen. Thus, by the time the organized search petered out for lack of evidence and manpower—try asking one question of everybody within a hundred-mile radius—James was quietly making his way, free of care, like a hardy pioneer looking for a homestead site.

The hint of kidnap went out early. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, of course, could not move until the waiting period was ended, but they did collect information and set up their organization ready to move into high speed at the instant of legal time. But then no ransom letter came; no evidence of the crime of kidnapping. This did not close the case; there were other cases on record where a child was stolen by adults for purposes other than ransom. It was not very likely that a child of six would be stolen by a neurotic adult to replace a lost infant, and Paul Brennan was personally convinced that James Holden had enough self-reliance to make such a kidnap attempt fail rather early in the game. He could hardly say so, nor could he suggest that James had indeed run away deliberately and skilfully, and with planned steps worthy of a much older person. He could only hint and urge the F.B.I. into any action that he could coerce them into taking; he did not care how or who brought James back just so long as the child was returned to his custody.

Then as the days wore into weeks with no sign, the files were placed in the inactive drawer. Paul Brennan made contact with a few private agencies.

He was stopped here, again, by another angle. The Holdens were by no means wealthy. Brennan could not justify the offer of some reward so large that people simply could not turn down the slim chance of collecting. If the missing one is heir to a couple of million dollars, the trustees can justify a reward of a good many thousand dollars for his return. The amount that Brennan was prepared to offer could not compel the services of a private agency on a full-time basis. The best and the most interested of the agencies took the case on a contingent basis; if something turned their way in the due course of their work they'd immediately take steps. Solving the case of a complete disappearance on the part of a child who virtually vanished into thin air would be good advertising, but their advertising budget would not allow them to put one man on the case without the first shred of evidence to point the way.

If Paul Brennan had been above-board, he could have evoked a lot of interest. The search for a six-year-old boy with the educational development of a youth of about eighteen, informed through the services of an electromechanical device, would have fired public interest, Government intervention, and would also have justified Paul Brennan's depth of interest. But Paul Brennan could say nothing about the excellent training, he could only hint at James Holden's mental proficiency which was backed up by the boy's school record. As it was, Paul Brennan's most frightful nightmare was one where young James was spotted by some eagle-eyed detective and then in desperation—anything being better than an enforced return to Paul Brennan—James Holden pulled out all the stops and showed everybody precisely how well educated he really was.

In his own affairs, Paul still had to make a living, which took up his time. As guardian and trustee of the Holden Estate, he was responsible to the State for his handling of James Holden's inheritance. The State takes a sensible view of the disbursements of the inheritance of a minor. Reasonable sums may be spent on items hardly deemed necessities to the average person, but the ceiling called "reasonable" is a flexible term and subject to close scrutiny by the State.

In the long run it was Paul Brennan's own indefensible position that made it impossible to prosecute a proper search for the missing James Holden. Brennan suspected James of building up a bank account under some false name, but he could not saunter into banks and ask to examine their records without a Court order. Brennan knew that James had not taken off without preparation, but the examination of the stuff that James left behind was not very informative. There was a small blanket missing and Mrs. Mitchell said that it looked as though some cans had been removed from the stock but she could not be sure. And in a large collection of boy's stuff, one would not observe the absence of a Boy Scout knife and other trivia. Had a 100% inventory been available, the list of missing items would have pointed out James Holden's avenue of escape.

The search for an adult would have included questioning of banks. No one knows whether such a questioning would have uncovered the bank-by-mail routine conducted under the name of Charles Maxwell. It is not a regular thing, but the receipt of a check drawn on a New York bank, issued by a publishing company, and endorsed to be paid to the account of so-and-so, accompanied by a request to open an account in that name might never be connected with the manipulations of a six-year-old genius, who was overtly just plain bright.

And so Paul Brennan worried himself out of several pounds for fear that James would give himself away to the right people. He cursed the necessity of keeping up his daily work routine. The hue-and-cry he could not keep alive, but he knew that somewhere there was a young boy entirely capable of reconstructing the whole machine that Paul Brennan wanted so desperately that he had killed for it.

Paul Brennan was blocked cold. With the F.B.I. maintaining a hands-off attitude because there was no trace of any Federal crime involved, the case of James Holden was relegated to the missing-persons files. It became the official opinion that the lad had suffered some mishap and that it would only be a matter of time before his body was discovered. Paul Brennan could hardly prove them wrong without explaining the whole secret of James Holden's intelligence, competence, and the certainty that the young man would improve upon both as soon as he succeeded in rebuilding the Holden Electromechanical Educator.

With the F.B.I. out of the picture, the local authorities waiting for the discovery of a small body, and the state authorities shelving the case except for the routine punch-card checks, official action died. Brennan's available reward money was not enough to buy a private agency's interest full-time.

Brennan could not afford to tell anybody of his suspicion of James Holden's source of income, for the idea of a child's making a living by writing would be indefensible without full explanation. However, Paul Brennan resorted to reading of magazines edited for boys. Month after month he bought them and read them, comparing the styles of the many writers against the style of the manuscript copy left behind by James.

Brennan naturally assumed that James would use a pen name. Writers often used pen names to conceal their own identity for any one of several reasons. A writer might use three or more pen names, each one identified with a known style of writing, or a certain subject or established character. But Paul Brennan did not know all there was to know about the pen-name business, such as an editor assigning a pen name to prevent the too-often appearance of some prolific writer, or conversely to make one writer's name seem exclusive with his magazine; nor could Brennan know that a writer's literary standing can be kept high by assigning a pen name to any second-rate material he may be so unfortunate as to turn out.

Paul Brennan read many stories written by James Holden under several names, including the name of Charles Maxwell, but Brennan's identification according to literary style was no better than if he had tossed a coin.

And so, blocked by his own guilt and avarice from making use of the legal avenues of approach, Paul Brennan fumed and fretted away four long years while James Holden grew from six to ten years old, hiding under the guise of the Hermit of Martin's Hill and behind the pleasant adult façade of Mrs. Janet Bagley.

---

CHAPTER TWELVE

If Paul Brennan found himself blocked in his efforts to find James Holden and the re-created Holden Educator, James himself was annoyed by one evident fact: Everything he did resulted in spreading the news of the machine itself.

Had he been eighteen or so, he might have made out to his own taste. In the days of late teen-age, a youth can hold a job and rent a room, buy his own clothing and conduct himself to the limit of his ability. At ten he is suspect, because no one will permit him to paddle his own canoe. At a later age James could have rented a small apartment and built his machine alone. But starting as young as he did, he was forced to hide behind the cover of some adult, and he had picked Mrs. Bagley because he could control her both through her desire for security and the promise of a fine education for the daughter Martha Bagley.

The daughter was a two-way necessity; she provided him with a contemporary companion and also gave him a lever to wield against the adult. A lone woman could have made her way without trouble. A lone woman with a girl-child is up against a rather horrifying problem of providing both support and parental care. He felt that he had done what he had to do, up to the point where Mrs. Bagley became involved with Tim Fisher or anybody else. This part of adulthood was not yet within his grasp.

But there it was and here it is, and now there was Martha to complicate the picture. Had Mrs. Bagley been alone, she and Tim could go off and marry and then settle down in Timbuctoo if they wanted to. But not with Martha. She was in the same intellectual kettle of sardines as James. Her taste in education was by no means the same. She took to the mathematical subjects indifferently, absorbing them well enough—once she could be talked into spending the couple of hours that each day demanded—but without interest. Martha could rattle off quotations from literary masters, she could follow the score of most operas (her voice was a bit off-key but she knew what was going on) and she enjoyed all of the available information on keeping a house in order. Her eye and her mind were, as James Holden's, faster than her hand. She went through the same frustrations as he did, with different tools and in a different medium. The first offside snick of the scissors she knew to be bad before she tried the pattern for size, and the only way she could correct such defective work was to practice and practice until her muscles were trained enough to respond to the direction of her mind.

Remove her now and place her in a school—even the most advanced school—and she would undergo the unhappy treatment that James had undergone these several years ago.

And yet she could not be cut loose. Martha was as much a part of this very strange life as James was. So this meant that any revision in overall policy must necessarily include the addition of Tim Fisher and not the subtraction of Mrs. Bagley and Martha.

"Charles Maxwell" had to go.

James's problem had not changed. His machine must be kept a secret as long as he could. The machine was his, James Quincy Holden's property by every known and unwritten legal right of direct, single, uncluttered inheritance. The work of his parents had been stopped by their death, but it was by no means finished with the construction of the machine. To the contrary, the real work had only begun with the completion of the first working model. And whether he turned out to be a machine-made genius, an over-powered dolt, or an introverted monster it was still his own personal reason for being alive.

He alone should reap the benefit or the sorrow, and had his parents lived they would have had their right to reap good or bad with him. Good or bad, had they lived, he would have received their protection.

As it was, he had no protection whatsoever. Until he could have and hold the right to control his own property as he himself saw fit, he had to hide just as deep from the enemy who would steal it as he must hide from the friend who would administrate it as a property in escrow for his own good, since he as a minor was legally unable to walk a path both fitting and proper for his feet.

So, the facts had to be concealed. Yet all he was buying was time.

By careful juggling, he had already bought some. Months with Jake Caslow, a few months stolidly fighting the school, and two with the help of Mrs. Bagley and Martha. Then in these later months there had been more purchased time; time gained by the post-dated engagement and the procrastinated marriage, which was now running out.

No matter what he did, it seemed that the result was a wider spread of knowledge about the Holden Electromechanical Educator.

So with misgiving and yet unaware of any way or means to circumvent the necessity without doing more overall harm, James decided that Tim Fisher must be handed another piece of the secret. A plausible piece, with as much truth as he would accept for the time being. Maybe—hand Tim Fisher a bit with great gesture and he would not go prying for the whole?

His chance came in mid-August. It was after dinner on an evening uncluttered with party or shower or the horde of just-dropped-in-friends of whom Tim Fisher had legion.

Janet Bagley and Tim Fisher sat on the low divan in the living room half-facing each other. Apart, but just so far apart that they could touch with half a gesture, they were discussing the problem of domicile. They were also still quibbling mildly about the honeymoon. Tim Fisher wanted a short, noisy one. A ten-day stay in Hawaii, flying both ways, with a ten-hour stopover in Los Angeles on the way back. Janet Bagley wanted a long and lazy stay somewhere no closer than fifteen hundred miles to the nearest telephone, newspaper, mailbox, airline, bus stop, or highway. She'd take the 762-day rocket trip to Venus if they had one available. Tim was duly sympathetic to her desire to get away from her daily grind for as long a time as possible, but he also had a garage to run, and he was by no means incapable of pointing out the practical side of crass commercialism.

But unlike the problem of the honeymoon, which Janet Bagley was willing to discuss on any terms for the pleasure of discussing it, the problem of domicile had been avoided—to the degree of being pointed.

For Janet Bagley was still torn between two loyalties. Hers was not a lone loyalty to James Holden, there had been almost a complete association with the future of her daughter in the loyalty. She realized as well as James did, that Martha must not be wrested from this life and forced to live, forever an outcast, raised mentally above the level of her age and below the physical size of her mental development. Mrs. Bagley thought only of Martha's future; she gave little or no thought on the secondary part of the problem. But James knew that once Martha was separated from the establishment, she could not long conceal her advanced information, and revealing that would reveal its source.

And so, as they talked together with soft voices, James Holden decided that he could best buy time by employing logic, finance, and good common sense. He walked into the living room and sat across the coffee table from them. He said, "You'll have to live here, you know."

The abrupt statement stunned them both. Tim sat bolt upright and objected, "I'll see to it that we're properly housed, young fellow."

"This isn't charity," replied James. "Nor the goodness of my little heart. It's a necessity."

"How so?" demanded Tim crossly. "It's my life—and Janet's."

"And—Martha's life," added James.

"You don't think I'm including her out, do you?"

"No, but you're forgetting that she isn't to be popped here and there as the fancy hits you, either. She's much to be considered."

"I'll consider her," snapped Tim. "She shall be my daughter. If she will, I'll have her use my name as well as my care and affection."

"Of course you will," agreed James. The quick gesture of Mrs. Bagley's hand towards Tim, and his equally swift caress in reply were noticed but not understood by James. "But you're not thinking deeply enough about it."

"All right. You tell me all about it."

"Martha must stay here," said James. "Neither of you—nor Martha—have any idea of how stultifying it can be to be forced into school under the supervision of teachers who cannot understand, and among classmates whose grasp of any subject is no stronger than a feeble grope in the mental dawn."

"Maybe so. But that's no reason why we must run our life your way."

"You're wrong, Mr. Fisher. Think a moment. Without hesitation, you will include the education of Martha Bagley along with the 'care and affection' you mentioned a moment ago."

"Of course."

"This means, Mr. Fisher, that Martha, approaching ten years old, represents a responsibility of about seven more years prior to her graduation from high school and another four years of college—granting that Martha is a standard, normal, healthy young lady. Am I right?"

"Sure."

"Well, since you are happy and willing to take on the responsibility of eleven years of care and affection and the expense of schooling the girl, you might as well take advantage of the possibilities here and figure on five years—or less. If we cannot give her the equal of a master's degree in three, I'm shooting in the dark. Make it five, and she'll have her doctor's degree—or at least it's equivalent. Does that make sense?"

"Of course it does. But—"

"No buts until we're finished. You'll recall the tales we told you about the necessity of hiding out. It must continue. During the school year we must not be visible to the general public."

"But dammit, I don't want to set up my family in someone else's house," objected Tim Fisher.

"Buy this one," suggested James. "Then it will be yours. I'll stay on and pay rent on my section."

"You'll—now wait a minute! What are you talking about?"

"I said, 'I'll pay rent on my section,'" said James.

"But this guy upstairs—" Tim took a long breath. "Let's get this straight," he said, "now that we're on the subject, what about Mr. Charles Maxwell?"

"I can best quote," said James with a smile, "'Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!'"

"That's Shakespeare."

"Sorry. That's Sir Walter Scott. The Lay of the Last Minstrel. Canto Six, Stanza Seventeen. The fact of the matter is that we could go on compounding this lie, but it's time to stop it. Mr. Charles Maxwell does not exist."

"I don't understand!"

"Hasn't it puzzled you that this hermit-type character that never puts a foot out of the house has been out and gone on some unstated vacation or business trip for most of the spring and summer?"

"Hadn't given it a thought," said Fisher with a fatuous look at Mrs. Bagley. She mooned back at him. For a moment they were lost in one another, giving proof to the idea that blinder than he who will not see is the fellow who has his eye on a woman.

"Charles Maxwell does not exist except in the minds of his happy readers," said James. "He is a famous writer of boys' stories and known to a lot of people for that talent. Yet he is no more a real person than Lewis Carroll."

"But Lewis Carroll did exist—"

"As Charles L. Dodgson, a mathematician famous for his work in symbolic logic."

"All right! Then who writes these stories? Who supports you—and this house?"

"I do!"

Tim blinked, looked around the room a bit wildly and then settled on Martha, looking at her helplessly.

"It's true, Tim," she said quietly. "It's crazy but it works. I've been living with it for years."

Tim considered that for a full minute. "All right," he said shortly. "So it works. But why does any kid have to live for himself?" He eyed James. "Who's responsible for you?"

"I am!"

"But—"

"Got an hour?" asked James with a smile. "Then listen—"

At the end of James Holden's long explanation, Tim Fisher said, "Me—? Now, I need a drink!"

James chuckled, "Alcoholic, of course—which is Pi to seven decimal places if you ever need it. Just count the letters."

Over his glass, Tim eyed James thoughtfully. "So if this is true, James, just who owns that fabulous machine of yours?"

"It is mine, or ours."

"You gave me to believe that it was a high-priority Government project," he said accusingly.

"Sorry. But I would lie as glibly to God Himself if it became necessary to protect myself by falsehood. I'm sorry it isn't a Government project, but it's just as important a secret."

"Anything as big as this should be the business of the Government."

"Perhaps so. But it's mine to keep or to give, and it's mine to study." James was thoughtful for a moment. "I suppose that you can argue that anything as important as this should be handed over to the authorities immediately; that a large group of men dedicated to such a study can locate its difficulties and its pitfalls and failures far swifter than a single youth of eleven. Yet by the right of invention, a process protected by the Constitution of the United States and circumvented by some very odd rulings on the part of the Supreme Court, it is mine by inheritance, to reap the exclusive rewards for my family's work. Until I'm of an age when I am deemed capable of managing my own life, I'd be 'protected' out of my rights if I handed this to anybody—including the Government. They'd start a commission full of bureaucrats who'd first use the machine to study how to best expand their own little empire, perpetuate themselves in office, and then they'd rule me out on the quaint theory that education is so important that it mustn't be wasted on the young."

Tim Fisher smiled wryly. He turned to Janet Bagley. "How do you want it?" he asked her.

"For Martha's sake, I want it his way," she said.

"All right. Then that's the way we'll have it," said Tim Fisher. He eyed James somewhat ruefully. "You know, it's a funny thing. I've always thought this was a screwy set-up, and to be honest, I've always thought you were a pretty bumptious kid. I guess you had a good reason. Anyway, I should have known Janet wouldn't have played along with it unless she had a reason that was really helping somebody."

James saw with relief that Tim had allied himself with the cause; he was, in fact, very glad to have someone knowledgeable and levelheaded in on the problem. Anyway he really liked Tim, and was happy to have the deception out of the way.

"That's all right," he said awkwardly.

Tim laughed. "Hey, will this contraption of yours teach me how to adjust a set of tappets?"

"No," said James quickly. "It will teach you the theory of how to chop down a tree but it can't show you how to swing an axe. Or," he went on with a smile, "it will teach you how to be an efficient accountant—but you have to use your own money!"

---

In the house on Martin's Hill, everybody won. Tim Fisher objected at first to the idea of gallivanting off on a protracted honeymoon, leaving a nine-year-old daughter in the care of a ten-year-old boy. But Janet—now Mrs. Fisher—pointed out that James and Martha were both quite competent, and furthermore there was little to be said for a honeymoon encumbered with a little pitcher that had such big ears, to say nothing of a pair of extremely curious eyes and a rather loud voice. And furthermore, if we allow the woman's privilege of adding one furthermore on top of another, it had been a long, long time since Janet had enjoyed a child-free vacation. So she won. It was not Hawaii by air for a ten-day stay. It was Hawaii by ship with a sixty-day sojourn in a hotel that offered both seclusion and company to the guests' immediate preference.

James Holden won more time. He felt that every hour was a victory. At times he despaired because time passed so crawlingly slow. All the wealth of his education could not diminish that odd sense of the time-factor that convinces all people that the length of the years diminish as age increases. Far from being a simple, amusing remark, the problem has been studied because it is universal. It is psychological, of course, and it is not hard to explain simply in terms of human experience plus the known fact that the human senses respond to the logarithm of the stimulus.

With most people, time is reasonably important. We live by the clock, and we die by the clock, and before there were clocks there were candles marked in lengths and sand flowing through narrow orifices, water dripping into jars, and posts stuck in the ground with marks for the shadow to divide the day. The ancient ones related womanhood to the moon and understood that time was vital in the course of Life.

With James, time was more important, perhaps, than to any other human being alive. He was fighting for time, always. His was not the immature desire of uneducated youth to become adult overnight for vague reasons.

With James it was an honest evaluation of his precarious position. He had to hide until he was deemed capable of handling his own affairs, after which he could fight his own battles in his own way without the interference of the laws that are set up to protect the immature.

With Tim Fisher and his brand-new bride out of the way, James took a deep breath at having leaped one more hurdle. Then he sat down to think.

Obviously there is no great sea-change that takes place at the Stroke Of Midnight on the date of the person's 21st birthday; no magic wand is waved over his scalp to convert him in a moment of time from a puling infant to a mature adult. The growth of child to adult is as gradual as the increase of his stature, which varies from one child to the next.

The fact remained that few people are confronted by the necessity of making a decision based upon the precise age of the subject. We usually cross this barrier with no trouble, taking on our rights and responsibilities as we find them necessary to our life. Only in probating an estate left by the demise of both parents in the presence of minor children does this legal matter of precise age become noticeable. Even then, the control exerted over the minor by the legal guardian diminishes by some obscure mathematical proportion that approaches zero as the minor approaches the legal age of maturity. Rare is the case of the reluctant guardian who jealously relinquishes the iron rule only after the proper litigation directs him to let go, render the accounting for audit, and turn over the keys to the treasury to the rightful heir.

James Holden was the seldom case. James Holden needed a very adroit lawyer to tell him how and when his rights and privileges as a citizen could be granted, and under what circumstances. From the evidence already at hand, James saw loopholes available in the matter of the legal age of twenty-one. But he also knew that he could not approach a lawyer with questions without giving full explanation of every why and wherefore.

So James Holden, already quite competent in the do-it-himself method of cutting his own ice, decided to study law. Without any forewarning of the monumental proportions of the task he faced, James started to acquire books on legal procedure and the law.

---

With the return of Tim and Janet Fisher matters progressed well. Mrs. Fisher took over the running of the household; Tim continued his running of the garage and started to dicker for the purchase of the house on Martin's Hill. The "Hermit" who had returned before the wedding remained temporarily. With a long-drawn plan, Charles Maxwell would slowly fade out of sight. Already his absence during the summer was hinting as being a medical study; during the winter he would return to the distant hospital. Later he would leave completely cured to take up residence elsewhere. Beyond this they planned to play it by ear.

James and Martha, freed from the housework routine, went deep into study.

Christmas passed and spring came and in April, James marked his eleventh birthday.

---

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

One important item continued to elude James Holden. The Educator could not be made to work in "tandem." In less technical terms, the Educator was strictly an individual device, a one-man-dog. The wave forms that could be recorded were as individual as fingerprints and pore-patterns and iris markings. James could record a series of ideas or a few pages of information and play them back to himself. During the playback he could think in no other terms; he could not even correct, edit or improve the phrasing. It came back word for word with the faithful reproduction of absolute fidelity. Similarly, Martha could record a phase of information and she, too, underwent the same repetition when her recording was played back to her.

But if Martha's recording were played through to James, utter confusion came. It was a whirling maze of colors and odors, sound, taste and touch.

It spoiled some of James Holden's hopes; he sought the way to mass-use, his plan was to employ a teacher to digest the information and then via the Educator, impress the information upon many other brains each coupled to the machine. This would not work.

He made an extra headset late in June and they tried it, sitting side-by-side and still it did not work. With Martha doing the reading, she got the full benefit of the machine and James emerged with a whirling head full of riotous colors and other sensations. At one point he hoped that they might learn some subject by sitting side-by-side and reading the text in unison, but from this they received the information horribly mingled with equal intensity of sensory noise.

He did not abandon this hope completely. He merely put it aside as a problem that he was not ready to study yet. He would re-open the question when he knew more about the whole process. To know the whole process meant studying many fields of knowledge and combining them into a research of his own.

And so James entered the summer months as he'd entered them before; Tim and Janet Fisher took off one day and returned the next afternoon with a great gay show of "bringing the children home for the summer."

Even in this day of multi-billion-dollar budgets and farm surpluses that cost forty thousand dollars per hour for warehouse rental, twenty-five hundred dollars is still a tidy sum to dangle before the eyes of any individual. This was the reward offered by Paul Brennan for any information as to the whereabouts of James Quincy Holden.

If Paul Brennan could have been honest, the information he could have supplied would have provided any of the better agencies with enough lead-material to track James Holden down in a time short enough to make the reward money worth the effort. Similarly, if James Holden's competence had been no greater than Brennan's scaled-down description, he could not have made his own way without being discovered.

Bound by his own guilt, Brennan could only fret. Everything including time, was running against him.

And as the years of James Holden's independence looked toward the sixth, Paul Brennan was willing to make a mental bet that the young man's education was deeper than ever.

He would have won. James was close to his dream of making his play for an appearance in court and pleading for the law to recognize his competence to act as an adult. He abandoned all pretense; he no longer hid through the winter months, and he did not keep Martha under cover either. They went shopping with Mrs. Fisher now and then, and if any of the folks in Shipmont wondered about them, the fact that the children were in the care and keeping of responsible adults and were oh-so-quick on the uptake stopped anybody who might have made a fast call to the truant officer.

Then in the spring of James Holden's twelfth year and the sixth of his freedom, he said to Tim Fisher. "How would you like to collect twenty-five hundred dollars?"

Fisher grinned. "Who do you want killed?"

"Seriously."

"Who wouldn't?"

"All right, drop the word to Paul Brennan and collect the reward."

"Can you protect yourself?"

"I can quote Gladstone from one end to the other. I can cite every civil suit regarding the majority or minority problem that has any importance. If I fail, I'll skin out of there in a hurry on the next train. But I can't wait forever."

"What's the gimmick, James?"

"First, I am sick and tired of running and hiding, and I think I've got enough to prove my point and establish my rights. Second, there is a bit of cupidity here; the reward money is being offered out of my own inheritance so I feel that I should have some say in where it should go. Third, the fact that I steer it into the hands of someone I'd prefer to get it tickles my sense of humor. The trapper trapped; the bopper bopped; the sapper hoist by his own petard."

"And—?"

"It isn't fair to Martha, either. So the sooner we get this whole affair settled, the sooner we can start to move towards a reasonable way of life."

"Okay, but how are we going to work it? I can't very well turn up by myself, you know."

"Why not?"

"People would think I'm a heel."

"Let them think so. They'll change their opinion once the whole truth is known." James smiled. "It'll also let you know who your true friends are."

"Okay. Twenty-five hundred bucks and a chance at the last laugh sounds good. I'll talk it over with Janet."

That night they buried Charles Maxwell, the Hermit of Martin's Hill.

---

BOOK THREE: