“That’s not all, Tim.”
Squeak-squeak. Squeak-squeak.
“I know,” said Timothy. “I believe it. Look, is it all right if I call you Peter? Since we’re friends.”
At their next meeting, Timothy went into details about his newspaper. He had kept all the copies, from the first smudged, awkwardly printed pencil issues to the very latest neatly typed ones. But he would not show Welles any of them.
“I just put down every day the things I most wanted to say, the news or information or opinion I had to swallow unsaid. So it’s a wild medley. The earlier copies are awfully funny. Sometimes I guess what they were all about, what made me write them. Sometimes I remember. I put down the books I read too, and mark them like school grades, on two points—how I liked the book, and whether it was good. And whether I had read it before, too.”
“How many books do you read? What’s your reading speed?”
It proved that Timothy’s reading speed on new books of adult level varied from eight hundred to nine hundred fifty words a minute. The average murder mystery—he loved them—took him a little less than an hour. A year’s homework in history, Tim performed easily by reading his textbook through three or four times during the year. He apologized for that, but explained that he had to know what was in the book so as not to reveal in examinations too much that he had learned from other sources. Evenings, when his grandparents believed him to be doing homework he spent his time reading other books, or writing his newspaper, “or something.” As Welles had already guessed, Tim had read everything in his grandfather’s library, everything of interest in the public library that was not on the closed shelves, and everything he could order from the state library.
“What do the librarians say?”
“They think the books are for my grandfather. I tell them that, if they ask what a little boy wants with such a big book. Peter, telling so many lies is what gets me down. I have to do it, don’t I?”
“As far as I can see, you do,” agreed Welles. “But here’s material for a while in my library. There’ll have to be a closed shelf here, too, though, Tim.”