And as long as he imagined he was this potty genius his maths lessons were strangely easy. Not only that, they were exciting.
The maths teacher began to treat him with favour, so he soon had an important job in Fred’s rocket system, which was spreading its stations right through the galaxy. He had to think up problems that would take a rocket exactly to its destination without refuelling. He sat in a tiny room, and simply invented problems.
Fred had bigger things to think about. His rockets could now dematerialise and rematerialise in any one of twelve other dimensions. It was all done by mathematics. Each dimension was full of strange beings and events and laws.
But it wasn’t just maths. He discovered the same method worked for science and physics. In those he was the genius inventor, with mad eyes, brother to the genius mathematician, and supplied all the gadgets and weapons needed in his rocket conquest of the twelve dimensions of the Universe.
In geography he was a tireless explorer, with skinny steely legs and a brick-red face and pale eyes and a very posh voice, cousin to the inventor and the mathematician, and for history he simply switched his whole rocket system into a thirteenth time-travel dimension.
So on this day with all this he forgot about his dream of the tiger until the end of the day, and then in the last lesson the English teacher read them a story about of all things a man-eating tiger. A tiger in India had killed over a hundred people, one by one, and eaten them. Now the hunter set out to kill it. As he listened, Fred sat in growing fear. The hunter bought cows and staked them out in the jungle at likely points, and on the first night the tiger killed one, and ate half. Then the hunter built a platform in a nearby tree and sat over the half-eaten cow with his rifle, which had a powerful torch lashed alongside it. But that night the tiger didn’t come back to the cow as the hunter expected. Instead it broke into a hut over ten miles away and dragged out a woman and disappeared with her. So the hunter followed the blood-trail and at last found the remains of the woman in a gulley. Then though it was a terrible thing not to take away the remains and bury them, the hunter sat up a tree over the poor woman’s head and arms and legs until night fell.
Night came suddenly. Warning calls came from the jungle creatures. Fred listened in terror. He was listening for the tiger. And the tiger came. The hunter heard a long low sigh, and stared down into the pitch darkness. He levelled his rifle slowly and aimed towards the sound, then switched on the torch. At that moment Fred shouted at the top of his voice:
‘Look out!’
The whole class, which had been listening in tense silence, jumped and turned round. The teacher stopped reading. All eyes were fixed on Fred.
‘What in the Lord’s name is the matter with you, Willox? Are you all right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then what are you shouting at?’
‘It was the tiger sir.’
‘What, were you trying to warn it or something?’
‘Yes, sir.’
The class tittered, the teacher called for silence and read on. The hunter saw the tiger in the light of the torch and fired. With a crashing roar the tiger leaped away into the darkness. Had he hit it? What had happened? Just then the bell rang for the end of lessons and the whole class groaned.
Fred ran all the way home, every now and then making great leaps, thinking about the tiger.
When they were all in their beds and the light out, Fred started to tell his brothers the story of the hunter and the tiger. They listened in dead silence. He told it very slowly, putting in all sorts of details, because he wanted to frighten them. Finally he got to the point where the hunter was sitting in the tree, over the grisly head and arms and legs of the woman, with the stump of dead branch sticking into his ribs and his legs gone dead and the jungle night falling. Then the terrible silence. Then the deer barking its tiger warning half a mile away. Then an even worse silence. And at that point — when he knew the tiger had arrived in that pitch darkness, and he was just about to tell about the strange, low sigh, Fred’s whole body froze. To his surprise, he found he couldn’t speak. Tears of fear were pouring down over his ears into the pillow.
After a few moments one of his brothers said:
‘Go on then, what next?’
Fred lay silent. He simply could not utter a sound.
‘He’s gone to sleep,’ said another voice.
The tiger’s eaten him,’ said the first. But nothing came from Fred. The two brothers sank off to sleep.
And Fred too, who lay not daring to move, finally drifted off to sleep.
He was standing under a tree. It was pitch dark but gradually he made out that it was the laburnum tree at their garden gate. His eyes adjusted rapidly. He saw the empty street quite clearly, all the sleeping house fronts, as if the moon had come out. But it wasn’t the moon. He realised he could see in the dark. The next thing he realised was that he was a tiger.
His first thought was that he must get away from the front of the house as quickly as possible, because if his mother looked out and saw him she would be frightened. Also, if anybody else saw him from some other bedroom they might guess where he’d come from and start enquiries.
He leaped over the garden gate with a wonderful sensation. It was such a joyful feeling, he went bounding up the middle of the street, like a giant, silent spring.
Suddenly, inside one of the houses a dog started barking madly. He imagined its goggling eyes and bristling neck.
Immediately Fred was away. He kept in close to the garden walls, so anybody looking out would most likely miss him. He took the shortest cut to the open country.
He had no idea what he was going to do. He felt restless, full of seething energy. He thought he might just run a few miles. So long as he didn’t meet anybody. It never occurred to him to worry what might happen at dawn.
It was such a wonderful feeling, being a tiger, that once he got beyond the last houses he raced through the darkness, which to him was as clear as if he had headlights. He only wanted to run all night, leaping over the cattle and horses.
A strong smell of cows, a hot green cud-chewing smell, came to him. Twirling up his long tail, he bounded towards the dark shapes of cattle lying in a huddled bunch. Gleefully, he thought what a fright he would give them. A roar seemed to gather itself at the bottom of his chest, but he kept silent. He didn’t want to wake the farms with the unnatural roar of a tiger. He permitted himself a few grunts, marvellous booming sounds, as if he had a big drum in his belly, as he loped across the grass. He would leapfrog over the whole lot.
Then in mid-career he stopped, flattened to the grass. He had seen two things. One was a big animal, nearly twice the size of a cow, that had got up from among the cows and was enlarging towards him, giving loud sniffs and snorts. It stopped and began stroking the ground, as if it were trying to wipe something off its forehoofs. A bull! And that bull seemed to know all about the smell of tiger.
But that wasn’t all. Another animal, away over to the left, was suddenly even more interesting than the bull. It was so interesting that Fred actually forgot about the bull for a moment, and stood up, to get a clearer view.
Standing on the far side of the field, looking at him, was another tiger.
But then the ground was shaking and the bull was coming. Fred felt no fear. He considered leaping over it, leaping aside, or meeting it head-on with a blow of his paw, which felt strong enough to knock a tree down, and he was thinking that when he’d got the bull out of the way, he’d go and investigate that other tiger.