“I don’t know,” he said. “The… the integration, I suppose. The thought that went into it. The importance of the crash barrier to Mrs. Scholtz’s stew and Sadie’s date, and which ferry Tony catches, and all the other happenings that can happen to the cattle and gods that use the subways.”
Peg laughed delightedly. “And do you think about all of the meanings to all of the people of all of the things you see?”
“I don’t have to think of them. They’re there, right in front of me. Surely you can see homemade borscht and a good night kiss and thousands of other little, important things, all wrapped up in those big helical springs?”
“I have to think about it. But I do see them.” She laughed again.
“What do you think about when you listen to Bach?”
He looked at her quickly. “Did I say I listened to Bach?”
“My Gestapo told me.” She looked at him with puzzlement. He wasn’t smiling. “You whistle it,” she explained.
“Do I? Well, all right then. What do I think of? Architecture, I think. And the complete polish of it. The way old J. S. burnished every note, and the careful matching of all those harmonic voices. And… and—”
“And what?”
He laughed, a burst of it, a compelling radiation which left little pieces of itself as smiles on the faces of the people around them. “And the sweating choirboys who had to pump the organ when he composed. How they must have hated him!”
A train came groaning into the station and stopped, snicking its doors open. “Watch them,” said Robin, his quick eyes taking inventory of the people who jostled each other out of the train. Not one in fifty is seeing anything. No one knows how far apart these pillars are, or the way all these rivets are set, or the cracks in the concrete under their feet. They’re all looking at things separated from them in space and time—the offices they have left, the homes they’re going to, the people they will see. Hardly any of them are consciously here, now. They’re all ghosts, and we’re a couple of Peeping Toms.”
“Robin, Robin, you’re such a Child!”
“To you, of course. You’re older than I am.”
“Four days.” It was a great joke between them.
“Four thousand years,” he said soberly. They found a seat. “And” I’m not a child. I’m a hyper-thymus. You said so yourself.”
“You won’t be for very much longer,” said Dr. Margaretta Wenzell. “Dr. Warfield and I will see to that.”
“What are you doing it for?”
“You’ll find out when we send the bill.”
“I know it isn’t that.”
“Of course not,” she said. Her remark tasted badly in her mouth. “It’s just… Robin, how long have you had that suit?”
“Uh… suit?” He looked vaguely at the sleeve. “Oh, about three years. It’s a good suit.”
“Of course it is.” It was, too. She remembered that he had gotten it with prize money from a poetry contest. “How many weeks room rent do you owe?”
“None!” he said triumphantly. “I rewired all the doorbells in the apartment house and fixed Mrs. Gridget’s vacuum cleaner and composed a song for her daughter’s wedding reception and invented a gadget to hold her cook book under the kitchen shelf, with a little light that goes on when she swings it out. Next thing I knew she handed me a rent receipt. Wasn’t that swell of her?”
“Oh,” said Peg weakly. She clutched grimly at the point she was trying to make. “How much are you in debt?”
“Oh, that,” he said.
“That.”
“I guess ten-twelve thousand.” He looked up. “Kcans Yppans. What are you driving at?”
“What did you say?”
He waved at the car card opposite. “Snappy Snack. Spelled backwards. Always spell things backward when you see them on the car cards. If you don’t, there’s no telling what you might miss.”
“Oh, you blithering idiot!”
“Sorry. What were you saying?”
“I was getting to this,” she said patiently. “There doesn’t seem to be anything you can’t do. You write, you paint, you compose, you invent things, you fix other things, you—”
“Cook,” he said, as she stopped for breath; and he added idly, “I make love, too.”
“No doubt,” said the gland specialist primly. “On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything you’ve accomplished with all of these skills.”
“They’re not skills. They’re talents. I have no skills.”
Peg saw the distinction, and smiled. It was quite true. One had to spend a little time in practice to acquire a skill. If Robin couldn’t do promisingly the first time he tried something, he would hardly try again. “A good point. And that is what Dr. Warfield and I want to adjust.”
“Adjust, she says. Going to shrivel up all the pretty pink lobulae in my thymus. The only thymus I’ve got, too.”
“And about time. You should have gotten rid of it when you were thirteen. Most people do.”
“And then I’ll be all grim and determined about everything, and generate gallons of sweat, and make thousands of dollars, so that at age thirty I can go back to school and get that high school diploma.”
“Haven’t you got a high school diploma?” asked Peg, her appalled voice echoing hollowly against her four post-graduate degrees.
“As a senior,” smiled Robin, “I hadn’t a thing but seniority. I’d been there six years. I didn’t graduate from school; I was released.”
“Robin, that’s awful!”
“Why is it awful? Oh—I suppose it is.” He looked puzzled and crestfallen.
Peg put her hand on his arm. It had nothing to do with logic, but something in her was wrenched when Robin looked hurt. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, Robin. What you learn, and what you do with it, are really more important than where you learn.”
“Yes… but not when. I mean, you can learn too late. I know lots of things, but the things I don’t know seem to have to do with getting along in the world. Isn’t that what you mean by ‘awful’? Isn’t that what you and Dr. Warfield are going to change?”
“That’s it. That’s right, Robin.
Oh, you’re such a strange person!”
“Strange?”
“I mean… you know, I was sure that Mel Warfield and I would have no end of trouble in persuading you take these thymus treatments.”
“Why?”
With a kind of exasperation she said, “I don’t think you fully realize that the change in you will be drastic. You’re going to lose a lot that’s bad about you—I’m sure of that. But you’ll see things quite differently. You… you—” She fought for a description of what Robin would be like without his passionate interest in too many things, and her creative facilities bogged down. “You’ll probably see things quite differently.”
He looked into her eyes thoughtfully. “Is that bad?”
Bad? There never was a man who had less evil about him, she thought. “I think not,” she said.
He spread his hands. “I don’t think so either. So why hesitate? You have mentioned that I do a lot of things. Would that be true if I got all frothed up every time I tried something I’d never tried before?”
“No. No, of course not.” She realized that it had been foolish of her to mix ordinary practical psychology into any consideration of Robin English. Obviously gland imbalances have frequent psychological symptoms, and in many of these cases the abnormal condition has its own self-justifying synapses which will set up a powerful defense mechanism when treatment is mentioned. Equally obviously, this wouldn’t apply to Robin. Where most people seem to have an inherent dislike of being changed, Robin seemed to have a subconscious yearning for just that.