Cooper hemmed and hawed a little and finally he admitted it.
"I read science fiction. I ran onto it when someone brought me a magazine six or seven years ago . . . no, I guess it's more like eight."
"I read the stuff myself," said Charley, to put him at his ease.
So they sat the rest of the afternoon and talked of science fiction.
THAT night Charley Porter lay in his bed in the little lake-shore cabin, staring into the darkness, trying to understand how it must have been for Cooper Jackson, lying there all those years, living with the characters out of children's books and later out of boys' books and then out of science fiction.
He had said that he'd never been in much pain, but sometimes the nights were long and it was hard to sleep, and that was how he'd got started with his imagining. He would imagine things to occupy his mind.
At first, it was just a mental exercise, saying such and such a thing is happening now and going on from there to some other thing that was happening. But after a while he began to see an actual set of characters acting on an imaginary stage, faint and fuzzy characters going through their parts. They were nebulous at first; later on, they became gray, like little skipping ghosts; then they had achieved the sharpness of black and white. About the time he began to deal with Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, the characters and backgrounds had begun to take on color and perspective.
And from Huck Firm and Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, he had gone on to science fiction.
Good Lord, thought Charley Porter. He went on to science fiction.
Take an invalid who had never moved out of his bed, who had never had a formal education, who knew little and cared less about the human viewpoint, give him an overwrought imagination and turn him loose on science fiction—and what have you got?