Silvio Pontevecchio seems to have been a baffled alcoholic marshmallow. Intelligent, Feuermann considered him, but unable to profit by it. Silvio had tried a dozen or more ventures, taking his dozen or more failures with the same meek surprise and a few quick ones. Even before Angelo’s birth, Feuermann deduced, it was Rosa’s work with the lodging house that supported them. Silvio did manage the furnace, but carrying ashes bothered his back. And so on. In the end (just as humbly and mildly, maybe) Silvio fell on the ice in front of a skidding truck, after drinking up money intended for a life insurance premium. “Poor bastard,” said Feuermann with genuine pity — “couldn’t even die right.” That happened when Angelo was seven. Angelo had loved his father, who told good stories and was kind in small matters. A year after Silvio’s death Rosa told her friend Feuermann how Angelo had said to her: “I will not, repeat not, lose my temper again.” And kept his word. She quit worrying about his mind and worried instead about his small size and his impatience with the tedium of school. (“Enforced play” — but that was a term Angelo himself used, to me, and much later. )
“He skipped three grades in secondary school,” Feuermann told me. “They didn’t like it. The kid drove ’em, Miles — talked ’em into a position where they had to let him take the examinations, which were nothing to him. Made ’em look silly, so they went to fussing about his ‘manner’ and ‘attitude’ and — what’s the word? — social adjustment, some damn thing. Brrah! Boy’s bright, that’s all, but wasn’t bright enough then to hide how bright he was.”
“Genius?”
“You tell me what that is — I dunno.”
“Supernormal ability generalized, let’s say.”
“That he has.”
“I sometimes wonder what the schools aim at nowadays.”
He made a business of refilling the meerschaum, sensing that I honestly wanted his opinion. “My Clara — it’s almost twenty years since she was in high school. I remember beating my brains about her schooling. They never seemed to want to teach her anything except how to be like everybody else. When she finished — bright, you know, nothing stupid about Clara — she could add a column of figures after a fashion, read a little if she had to. Hated books, still does. Always been a heavy reader myself, be lost nowadays if I wasn’t. Damned if I know what she did learn. Self-expression before she could have anything to express. Social consciousness, whatever that is, when even now she hasn’t enough command of language to tell you what she thinks society is. Scraps of this and that, no logic to hold ’em together. Everything made easy — and how are you going to make education easy? You might as well try to build an athlete by keeping him in a hammock with cream puffs and beer. Why, Miles, I’ve put in seventy years trying to get an education, and only done a half-baked job of it. I guess Angelo’s school is about the same. Only, bless your heart, he’s learned by now to treat it as a joke, and damn well keep the joke to himself.”
“Maybe the schools have come to regard education as a sort of by-product, something it would be nice to have if it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Oh,” said the gentle old man, “I wouldn’t say that, Miles. I believe they try.” He added, with I think no trace of humorous intent: “Maybe if they started by educating teachers it would help. And there still are a few with high standards — I found that out when it was too late to do Clara any good…. Anyway Angelo’s a good boy, Miles — nice” — he was fumbling for words himself — “clean, goodhearted. Mean to say he’s no damn freak. If it wasn’t for his peewee size and that poor little game leg…”
“Polio?”
“Yes, at four. Happened before I came here. Gets better as he grows. Doctor told Rosa he might be able to drop the brace after his teens. It shuts him out of a lot. But he never seems to mind that much.”
“Might’ve helped him develop his brains.”
“Might.” We left it there, for my friend was suppressing yawns. I sought my own room, went to bed lethargically like a tired human being.
I woke in a fog to a sound of snoring; my wrist watch said four-thirty. It was never my way, nor the way of any Salvayan, I should think, to wake with a thick head. The snoring was on the first floor, had to be Feuermann, but was unreasonably loud. I was aware of a nasty sweetish stench and my forehead was a block of dull pain. Something tumbled from my pillow to the floor, and another smell fetched me furiously wide awake: the Martian scent, individualized as it always is and certainly not my own.
I snapped the light on. The thing fallen from my pillow was a wad of cotton, still foul with common chloroform.
I thought at first that nothing was missing. Then I snatched up my bottle of scent-destroyer. Two thirds gone.
My door was ajar. Out in the hall, I learned the snoring was loud because Feuermann’s door was open too. A street lamp showed me his bed. No chloroform here. I made sure the old man was unharmed, his sleep natural though noisy. Back in my room, I saw that my clothing, hung on a chair, was disarranged. The bronze mirror in the bureau was safe. My wallet was too, the money intact, but a note had been shoved in among the bills. A note in our tiny Salvayan script, which looks to human eyes like random dots. It was unsigned and casuaclass="underline"
Please observe that I play fair. Your S-D bottle is not quite empty.
Nothing so artless as a human-style burglary had occurred to me. But Namir was only following the oldest Observers’ Rule: Act human. I stopped laughing when I considered one non-human element: I could not drive Namir into the grip of the police without betraying our people. He would exploit that fact and never lose sight of it. It was like yielding a handicap of two rooks to a chess player no weaker than myself.
One window was more widely open than I had left it. Namir had come in there from the back yard. A ladder rested against the wall short of my window sill, an easy climb. I had noticed it on its side yesterday by the fence, likely left over from a recent paint job on the window casings. And what about that bulldog? Sunrise was not far away. The wooden back-yard fence had a blank door to the side street — Martin Street. A pile of rags near it troubled me because I couldn’t recall seeing it before.
I returned sniffing to the hall, a bathrobe over my pajamas. I heard a fuzzy murmur of another snore upstairs. No scent. Namir would surely be gone. He would not waste the scent-destroyer, but would wait till he could strip and dab it on the scent-gland areas. I tried the second floor. The bathroom was empty, and the vacant room over mine. The two tenants’ doors were open a crack. From the room in the middle came that cozy snoring and a whiff of sachet. No chloroform. Angelo had mentioned old ladies. They were probably safe. I looked in the front room.