“I think you’d better. Don’t you?”
“Why are you doing it for nothing, Dr. Welles?”
“I think you know why.”
The boy sat down in the glider and pushed himself meditatively back and forth. The glider squeaked.
“You’re interested. You’re curious,” he said.
“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.”
“Could you tell me why? I know about the library books. Some of them might scare people, and some are—”
“Some of my books might scare you too, Tim. I’ll tell you a little about abnormal psychology if you like, one of these days, and then I think you’ll see that until you’re actually trained to deal with such cases, you’d be better off not knowing too much about them.”
“I don’t want to be morbid,” agreed Tim. “All right. I’ll read only what you give me. And from now on I’ll tell you things. There was more than the newspaper, you know.”
“I thought as much. Do you want to go on with your tale?”
“It started when I first wrote a letter to a newspaper—of course, under a pen name. They printed it. For a while I had a high old time of it—a letter almost every day, using all sorts of pen names. Then I branched out to magazines, letters to the editor again. And stories—I tried stories.”
He looked a little doubtfully at Welles, who said only: “How old were you when you sold the first story?”
“Eight,” said Timothy. “And when the check came, with my name on it, ‘T. Paul,’ I didn’t know what in the world to do.”
“That’s a thought. What did you do?”
“There was a sign in the window of the bank. I always read signs, and that one came back to my mind. ‘Banking By Mail.’ You can see I was pretty desperate. So I got the name of a bank across the Bay and I wrote them—on my typewriter—and said I wanted to start an account, and here was a check to start it with. Oh, I was scared stiff, and had to keep saying to myself that, after all, nobody could do much to me. It was my own money. But you don’t know what it’s like to be only a small boy! They sent the check back to me and I died ten deaths when I saw it. But the letter explained. I hadn’t endorsed it. They sent me a blank to fill out about myself. I didn’t know how many lies I dared to tell. But it was my money and I had to get it. If I could get it into the bank, then some day I could get it out. I gave my business as ‘author’ and I gave my age as twenty-four. I thought that was awfully old.”
“I’d like to see the story. Do you have a copy of the magazine around?”
“Yes,” said Tim. “But nobody noticed it—I mean, T. Paul’ could be anybody. And when I saw magazines for writers on the newsstands and bought them, I got on to the way to use a pen name on the story and my own name and address up in the corner. Before that I used a pen name and sometimes never got the things back or heard about them. Sometimes I did, though.”
“What then?”
“Oh, then I’d endorse the check payable to me and sign the pen name, and then sign my own name under it. Was I scared to do that! But it was my money.”
“Only stories?”
“Articles, too. And things. That’s enough of that for today. Only— I just wanted to say—a while ago, T. Paul told the bank he wanted to switch some of the money over to a checking account. To buy books by mail, and such. So, I could pay you, Dr. Welles—” with sudden formality.
“No, Tim,” said Peter Welles firmly. “The pleasure is all mine. What I want is to see the story that was published when you were eight. And some of the other things that made T. Paul rich enough to keep a consulting psychiatrist on the payroll. And, for the love of Pete, will you tell me how all this goes on without your grandparents’ knowing a thing about it?”
“Grandmother thinks I send in box tops and fill out coupons,” said Tim. “She doesn’t bring in the mail. She says her little boy gets such a big bang out of that little chore. Anyway that’s what she said when I was eight. I played mailman. And there were box tops—I showed them to her, until she said, about the third time, that really she wasn’t greatly interested in such matters. By now she has the habit of waiting for me to bring in the mail.”
Peter Welles thought that was quite a day of revelation. He spent a quiet evening at home, holding his head and groaning, trying to take it all in.
And that I. Q.—120, nonsense! The boy had been holding out on him. Tim’s reading had obviously included enough about I. Q. tests, enough puzzles and oddments in magazines and such, to enable him to stall successfully. What could he do if he would co-operate?
Welles made up his mind to find out.
He didn’t find out. Timothy Paul went swiftly through the whole range of Superior Adult tests without a failure of any sort. There were no tests yet devised that could measure his intelligence. While he was still writing his age with one figure, Timothy Paul had faced alone, and solved alone, problems that would have baffled the average adult. He had adjusted to the hardest task of all—that of appearing to be a fairly normal, B-average small boy.
And it must be that there was more to find out about him. What did he write? And what did he do besides read and write, learn carpentry and breed cats and magnificently fool his whole world?
When Peter Welles had read some of Tim’s writings, he was surprised to find that the stories the boy had written were vividly human, the product of close observation of human nature. The articles, on the other hand, were closely reasoned and showed thorough study and research. Apparently Tim read every word of several newspapers and a score or more of periodicals.
“Oh, sure,” said Tim, when questioned. “I read everything. I go back once in a while and review old ones, too.”