Albert had a speech composed for him by his speech-writing machine, but for some reason he did not use it. He went on his own, and that was disaster. He got to his feet when he was introduced, and he stuttered and spoke nonsense!
“Ah—only the sick oyster produces nacre,” he said, and they all gaped at him. What sort of beginning for a speech was that? “Or do I have the wrong creature?” Albert asked weakly.
“Eurema doesn’t look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn’t her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”
Everybody was watching him with pained expression.
“Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme! But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there is none of us detectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”
“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end to it? People will understand.”
“Of course I’m unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn’t devised by a hale man.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.
“Know you,” said Albert, “that it is not the fine bulls and wonderful cattle who make the new paths. Only a crippled calf makes a new path. In everything that survives there must be an element of the incongruous. Hey, you know the woman who said, ‘My husband is incongruous, but I never liked Washington in the summertime.’ ”
Everybody gazed at him in stupor.
“That’s the first joke I ever made,” Albert said lamely. “My joke-making machine makes them a lot better than I do.” He paused and gaped, and gulped a big breath.
“Dolts!” he croaked out fiercely then. “What will you do for dolts when the last of us is gone? How will you survive without us?”
Albert had finished. He gaped and forgot to close his mouth. They led him back to his seat. His publicity machine explained that Albert was tired from overwork, and then that machine passed around copies of the speech that Albert was supposed to have given.
It had been an unfortunate episode. How noisome it is that the innovators are never great men, and that the great men are never good for anything but just being great men.
In that year a decree went forth from Caesar that a census of the whole country should be taken. The decree was from Cesare Panebianco, the President of the country. It was the decimal year proper for the census, and there was nothing unusual about the decree. Certain provisions, however, were made for taking a census of the drifters and decrepits who were usually missed, to examine them and to see why they were so. It was in the course of this that Albert was picked up. If any man ever looked like a drifter and decrepit, it was Albert.
Albert was herded in with other derelicts, set down at a table, and asked tortuous questions. As:
“What is your name?”
He almost muffed that one, but he rallied and answered, “Albert.”
“What time is it by that clock?”
They had him in his old weak spot. Which hand was which? He gaped and didn’t answer.
“Can you read?” they asked him.
“Not without my—” Albert began. “I don’t have with me my—No, I can’t read very well by myself.”
“Try.”
They gave him a paper to mark up with true and false questions. Albert marked them all true, believing that he would have half of them right. But they were all false. The regularized people are partial to falsehood. Then they gave him a supply-the-word test on proverbs.
“---- is the best policy” didn’t mean a thing to him. He couldn’t remember the names of the companies that he had his own policies with.
“A --- in time saves nine” contained more mathematics than Albert could handle.
“There appear to be six unknowns,” he told himself, “and only one positive value, nine. The equating verb ‘saves’ is a vague one. I cannot solve this equation. I am not even sure that it is an equation. If only I had with me my—”
But he hadn’t any of his gadgets or machines with him. He was on his own. He left half a dozen other proverb fill-ins blank. Then he saw a chance to recoup. Nobody is so dumb as not to know one answer if enough questions are asked.
“----- is the mother of invention,” it said.
“Stupidity,” Albert wrote in his weird ragged hand. Then he sat back in triumph. “I know that Eurema and her mother,” he snickered. “Man, how I do know them!”
But they marked him wrong on that one too. He had missed every answer to every test. They began to fix him a ticket to a progressive booby hatch where he might learn to do something with his hands, his head being hopeless.
A couple of Albert’s urbane machines came down and got him out of it. They explained that, while he was a drifter and a derelict, yet he was a rich drifter and derelict, and that he was even a man of some note.
“He doesn’t look it, but he really is—pardon our laughter—a man of some importance,” one of the fine machines explained. “He has to be told to close his mouth after he has yawned, but for all that he is the winner of the Finnerty-Hochmann Trophy. We will be responsible for him.”
Albert was miserable as his fine machines took him out, especially when they asked that he walk three or four steps behind them and not seem to be with them. They gave him some pretty rough banter and turned him into a squirming worm of a man. Albert left them and went to a little hide-out he kept.
“I’ll blow my crawfishing brains out,” he swore. “The humiliation is more than I can bear. Can’t do it myself, though. I’ll have to have it done.”
He set to work building a device in his hide-out.
“What you doing, boss?” Hunchy asked him. “I had a hunch you’d come here and start building something.”
“I’m building a machine to blow my pumpkin-picking brains out,” Albert shouted. “I’m too yellow to do it myself.”
“Boss, I got a hunch there’s something better to do. Let’s have some fun.”
“Don’t believe I know how to,” Albert said thoughtfully. “I built a fun machine once to do it for me. He had a real revel till he flew apart, but he never seemed to do anything for me.”
“This fun will be for you and me, boss. Consider the world spread out. What is it?”
“It’s a world too fine for me to live in any longer,” Albert said. “Everything and all the people are perfect, and all alike. They’re at the top of the heap. They’ve won it all and arranged it all neatly. There’s no place for a clutter-up like me in the world. So I get out.”
“Boss, I’ve got a hunch that you’re seeing it wrong. You’ve got better eyes than that. Look again, real canny, at it. Now what do you see?”
“Hunchy, Hunchy, is that possible? Is that really what it is? I wonder why I never noticed it before. That’s the way of it, though, now that I look closer.