At last, panting and moaning he stood, surrounded by the cherry red pieces of metal on the floor.
Keena smiled and said softly, “Ah, you have no more metal on you. Would you like to have further proof?”
Amery Heater swallowed hard. He looked up at the open-mouthed judge. He glanced at the jury.
“The prosecution withdraws,” he said hoarsely.
The judge managed to close his mouth.
“Case dismissed,” he said. “Young woman, I suggest you go back wherever you came from.”
She smiled blandly up at him. “Oh, no! I can’t go back. I went back once and found that my world was very empty. They laughed at my new clothes. I said I wanted Billy. They said they would transport him to my world. But Billy wouldn’t be happy there. So I came back.”
Maloney stood up, yawned and stretched. He smiled at the jury. Two men were helping the woman back up into her chair. She was still green.
He winked at Keena and said, “Come on home, honey.”
They walked down the aisle together and out the golden oak doors. Nobody made a sound, or a move to stop them.
Anita Hempflet, extremely conscious of the fact that the man who had left her waiting at the altar thirty-one years before was buried just beyond the com hills in her vegetable garden, forced her razor lips into a broad smile, beamed around at the people sitting near her and said, in her high, sharp voice:
“Well! That girl is going to make a lovely neighbor! If you folks will excuse me, I’m going to take her over some fresh strawberry preserves.”
A Child Is Crying
Scientists cringe in terror as a small boy leads them to a glimpse of the future!
His mother, who was brought to New York with him, said, at the press conference, “Billy is a very bright boy. There isn’t anything else we can teach him.”
The school teacher, back in Albuquerque, shuddered delicately, looking at the distant stars, her head on the broad shoulder of the manual training teacher. She said, “I’m sorry, Joe, if I talk about him too much. It seems as if everywhere I go and everything I do, I can feel those eyes of his watching me.”
Bain, the notorious pseudo-psychiatrist, wrote an article loaded with clichés in which he said, “Obviously the child is a mutation. It remains to be seen whether or not his peculiar talents are inheritable.” Bain mentioned the proximity of Billy’s birthplace to atomic experimentation.
Emanuel Gardensteen was enticed out of his New Jersey study where he was putting on paper his newest theories in symbolic logic and mathematical physics. Gardensteen spent five hours in a locked room with Billy. At the end of the interview Gardensteen emerged, biting his thin lips. He returned to New Jersey, locked his house, and took a job as a section hand repairing track on the Pennsy Railroad. He refused to make a statement to the press.
John Folmer spent four days getting permission to go ninety feet down the corridor of the Pentagon Building to talk to a man who was entitled to wear Five stars on his uniform.
“Sit down, Folmer,” the general said. “All this is slightly irregular.”
“It’s an irregular situation,” Folmer retorted. “I couldn’t trust Garrity and Hoskins to relay my idea to you in its original form.”
The lean little man behind the mammoth desk licked his lips slowly. “You infer that my subordinates are either stupid or self-seeking?”
Folmer lit a cigarette, keeping his movements slow and unhurried. He grinned at the little gray man. “Sir, suppose you let me tell you what I’m thinking, and after you have the story, then you can assess any blame you feel is due.”
“Go ahead.”
“You have read about Billy Massner, General?”
The gray man snorted. “Read about him! I’ve read about him, listened to newscasts about him, watched his monstrous little face in the newsreels. The devil with him! A confounded freak.”
“But is he?” Folmer queried, his eyes fixed on the general’s face.
“What do you mean, Folmer. Get to the point.”
“Certainly. It is of no interest to you or to me, General, to determine the reason for the kid’s talents. What do we know about those talents? Just this. The kid could read and write and carry on a conversation when he was thirteen months old. At two and a half he was doing quadratic equations. At four, completely on his own, he worked out theories regarding non-Eculidian geometry and theories of relativity that parallel the work of Einstein. Now he is seven. You read the Beach Report after the psychologists got through with him. He can carry a conversation on mathematical concepts right on over the heads of our best men who have given their life to such things.
“The thing that happened to Gardensteen is an example. The Beach Report states that William Massner, age 7, is the most completely rational being ever tested. The factor of imagination is so small as not to respond to any known test. The kid gets his results by taking known and observed data and extrapolating from that point, proving his theories by exhaustive cross checks.”
“So what, Folmer? So what?” the general snapped.
“What is our weapon of war, General? The top weapon?” Folmer asked meaningly.
“The atom bomb, of course!”
“And the atom bomb was made possible by the work of physicists in the realm of pure theory. The men who made the first bomb compare to Billy Massner the way you and I compare to those men.”
“What are you getting at?” The general’s tone showed curiosity and a little uneasiness.
“Just this, General. Billy Massner is a national resource. He is our primary weapon of offense and defense. As soon as our enemy realize what we have in this kid, I have a hunch they’ll have him killed. Inside that head of his is our success in the war that’s coming up one of these days.”
The general placed his small hard palm on a yellow octagonal pencil and rolled it back and forth on the surface of his huge desk. The wrinkles between his eyebrows deepened. He said gently, “Folmer, I’m sort of out of my depth on this atomic business. To me it’s just a new explosive — more effective than those in use up to this time.”
“And it will be continually improved,” Folmer asserted. “You know what a very small portion of the available energy is released right now. I’ll bet you this kid can point out the way to release all the potential energy.”
“Why haven’t you talked this over with the head physicist?”
“But I have! He sneered at the kid at First. I managed to get him an interview with Billy. Now he’s on my side. He’s too impressed to be envious. The kid fed him a production shortcut.”
The general shrugged in a tired way. “What do we have to do?”
“I’ve talked to the boy’s mother and last week I flew out and saw the father. They only pretend to love the kid. He isn’t exactly the sort of person you can love. They’ll be willing to let me adopt him. They’ll sign him over. It will cost enough dough out of the special fund to give them a life income of a thousand a month.”
“And then what?” the general wanted to know.
“The kid is rational. I explain to him what we want. If he does what we want him to do, he gets anything in the world he wants. Simple.”
The general straightened his shoulders. “Okay, Folmer,” he snapped. “Get under way. And make sure this monster of yours is protected until we can get him behind wire.”
Folmer stood up and smiled. “I took the liberty of putting a guard on him, sir.”
“Good work! I’ll be available to iron out any trouble you run into. I’ll have a copy disc of this conversation cut for your file...”