In spite of the general’s choice of words, William Massner was not a monster. He was slightly smaller than average for his age, fine-boned and with dark hair and fair skin. His knuckles had the usual grubby childhood look about them. At casual glance he seemed a normal, decent-looking youngster. The difference was in the absolute immobility of his face. His eyes were gray and level. He had never been known, since the age of six months, to show fear, anger, surprise or joy.
After the brief ten minutes in court, John Folmer brought Billy Massner to his hotel room. Folmer sat on the bed and Billy sat on a chair by the windows. John Folmer was a slightly florid man of thirty, with pale thinning hair and a soft bulge at the waistline. His hands were pink and well-kept. Though he had conducted all manner of odd negotiations with the confidence of an imaginative and thoroughgoing bureaucrat, the quiet gray-eyed child gave him a feeling of awe.
“Bill,” he said, “are you disappointed in your parents for signing you away?”
“I made them uncomfortable. Their affection was a pretense. It was an obvious move for them to trade me for financial security.” The boy’s voice had the flat precision of a slide rule.
Folmer tried to smile warmly. “Well, Bill, at least the sideshow is over. We’ve gotten you away from all the publicity agents. You must have been getting sick of that.”
“If you hadn’t stopped it, I would have,” the boy stated.
Folmer stared. “How would you do that?”
“I have observed average children. I would become an average child. They would no longer be interested.”
“You could fake possessing their mentality?”
“It wouldn’t be difficult,” the boy said. “At the present time I am faking an intelligence level as much lower than my true level as the deviation between a normal child and the level I am faking.”
Folmer uncomfortably avoided the level gray eyes. He said heartily, “We’ll admit you’re pretty... unusual, Bill. All the head doctors have been trying to find out why and how. But nobody has ever asked you for your opinion. Why are you such a... deviation from the norm, Bill?”
The boy looked at him for several motionless seconds. “There is nothing to be gained by giving you that information, Folmer.” Folmer stood up and walked over to the boy. He glared down at him, his arm half lifted. “Don’t get snippy with me, you little freak!”
The level gray eyes met his. Folmer took three jerky steps backward and sat down awkwardly on the bed. “How did you do that?” he gasped.
“I suggested it to you.”
“But—”
“I could just as well have suggested that you open the window and step out.” And the child added tonelessly, “We’re on the twenty-first floor.”
Folmer got out a cigarette with shaking hands and lit it, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs. He tried to laugh. “Then why didn’t you?”
“I don’t like unnecessary effort. I have made a series of time-rhythm extrapolations. Even though you are an unimportant man, your death now would upset the rhythm of one of the current inevitabilities, changing the end result. With your death I would be forced to isolate once again all variables and reestablish the new time-rhythm to determine one segment of the future.”
Folmer’s eyes bulged. “You can tell what will happen in the future?”
“Of course. A variation of the statement that the end preexists in the means. The future preexists in the present, with all variables subject to their own cyclical rhythm.”
“And my going out the window would change the future?”
“One segment of it,” the boy replied.
Folmer’s hands shook. He looked down at them. “Do... do you know when I’m supposed to die?”
“If I tell you, the fact of your knowledge will make as serious an upset in time-rhythm as the fact of your stepping out the window. Your probable future actions would be conditioned by your knowledge.”
Folmer smiled tightly. “You’re hedging. You don’t know the future.”
“You called me up here to tell me that we are taking a plane today or tomorrow to a secret research laboratory in Texas. We will take that plane. In Texas the head physicist at the laboratory will set up a morning conference system whereby each staff member will bring current research problems to a roundtable meeting. I will answer the questions they put to me. No more than that. I will not indicate any original line of research, even though I will be asked to do so.”
“And why not?”
“For the same reason that you are not now dead on the pavement two hundred feet below that window. Any interference with time-rhythm means laborious recalculations. Since by a process of extrapolation I can determine the future, my efforts would be conditioned by my knowledge of that future.”
Folmer tried to keep his voice steady as he asked, “You could foresee military attacks?”
“Of course,” the child said.
“Do you know of any?”
“I do.”
“You will advise us of them so that we can prepare, so that we can strike first?” In spite of himself Folmer sounded eager.
“I will not...”
Folmer took William Massner to Texas. They landed at San Antonio where an army light plane took them a hundred miles northwest to the underground laboratories of the government where able men kept themselves from thinking of the probable results of their work. They were keen and sensitive men, the best that the civilized world had yet produced — but they worked with death, with the musty odor of the grave like a gentle touch against their lips. And they didn’t stop to think. It was impossible to think of consequences. Think of the job at hand. Think of CM. Think in terms of unbelievable temperatures, of the grotesque silhouette of a man baked into the asphalt of Hiroshima...
Billy was given a private suite, his needs attended to by two WAC corporals who had been given extensive security checks. The two girls were frightened of the small boy. They were frightened because he spent one full hour each day doing a series of odd physical exercises which he had worked out for himself. But that didn’t frighten them as much as the fact that during the rest of his free time he sat absolutely motionless in a chair, his eyes half closed, gazing at a blank wall a few feet in front of him. At times he seemed to be watching something, some image against the flat white wall.
Folmer was unable to sleep. He didn’t eat properly. He had told no one of his talk with Billy at the New York hotel. His knowledge ate at him. As his cheeks sagged and turned sallow, as his plump body seemed to wither, the fear in his eyes became deeper and more set.
The research staff made more progress during the First month of roundtable meetings than they had during the entire previous year. The younger men went about with an air of excitement thinly covered by a rigid control. The older men seemed to sink more deeply into fortified battlements of the mind. William Massner’s slow and deliberate answers to involved questions resulted in the scrapping of two complete lines of research and a tremendous spurt of progress in other lines.
Folmer could not forget the attack which Billy had spoken of and, moreover, could not forget the fact that Billy knew when the attack would occur. As Folmer lay rigid and unsleeping during the long hours of night, he felt that the silver snouts of mighty rockets were screaming through the stratosphere, arching and falling toward him, reaching out to explode each separate molecule of his body into a hot whiteness.
On the twenty-third of October, after William Massner had been at the Research Center for almost seven weeks, Folmer, made bold by stiff drinks, sought out Burton Janks, the Security Control Officer. They went together to a small soundproofed storeroom and closed the door behind them. Janks was a slim, tanned man with pale milky eyes, dry brown hair and muscular hands. He listened to Folmer’s story without any change in expression.