' "You mean too loud," I suggested.
'But no. He wouldn't have that at all. For him it was "too bright."
'I don't want to bore you with technicalities and detailed accounts of my findings. That sort of thing is for the experts; I've got volumes of notes at home which I shall publish one day for them to scratch their heads over. More patience went into those than I have ever put into anything. I had to grasp each little hint and be ready to return to it later as the boy grew, for it was no good trying to force description and explanation before he was sufficiently developed to understand what I asked him. That sort of treatment produces, as I expect you know from experience, only a defiant sulkiness.
'Very often it was no good putting a question flatly. One had to set the scene and observe results. For instance, I had discovered that for him telegraph wires were alive, "lighted" he called it, with their electric messages. But it was no good putting the general question which occurred to me as a natural corollary: "Can you overhear telephone conversations?" He had probably never noticed whether he could or not—try asking the average child about overtones or the composition of a shade of colour. One had to take him close to a telephone wire and inquire the result. Actually the result was positive. He could "overhear" up to a distance of ten feet or so from the wires though he found it "faint."
'There were plenty of other discoveries. He knew at once whether an electric wire was "live" or not. The current he seemed to perceive perhaps as a fluid stemmed by the gap in the circuit. The radiation from cars with magnetos worried him, coil ignition bothered him only a little. He could judge voltages in wires with astonishing accuracy up to about 500 volts. Above that he found them all "bright."
'He had a high sensitivity, too, to static electricity, so much so that in certain weather nothing could induce him to brush or comb his hair, and, perhaps as a side issue of this, he showed a power of weather prediction some degrees more accurate than his elders'.'
Chapter Five
VOICES OF THE VOID
'By the time young Ted was ten and a half Jim had come to accept his son's powers as a permanent quality and not, as he had half suspected before, something which would be outgrown with childhood. He began to make plans for him. More impressed, perhaps, by the means of Ted's first self-revelation than by any of its subsequent manifestations Jim had ambitions to get him into the best wireless shop in Irkwell when he should leave school at fourteen.
' "That's the thing," he said. "Just let em try 'im once, that's all. Why 'e can tell where any set's wrong in a jiffy—and put it right, too. There's good money in a wireless shop, if a man knows the job, which most of 'em don't, seemingly. The lad ought to do well—maybe get a better job in one of the big places in Derby in a year or two."
'He looked disappointed when I shook my head.
' "What's wrong wi' that?" he demanded.
' "Not good enough, Jim," I told him. "What he ought to have if it can be managed is a real training. He'd just be wasting his time in a shop."
' "What, a college trainin' like? Seems to me like that's more like wastin' 'is time than t'other. If t'lad can do a job and's a chance, let 'im do it, I say. There's plenty o' chaps full of book learnin' an' unemployed with it."
' "Ted wouldn't be," I said. "You don't realise it, Jim. This gift makes him something altogether exceptional. There's no telling where it may lead. Have you ever seen him examine a wireless valve? The contempt he has for it! He looks at it as you or I might look at a car without springs. I took him to a hospital once to show him the apparatus; he looked at all the radiography stuff and the rest of the electrical set-up the same way.
' "You see, Jim, all our most advanced electrical appliances seem quite primitive to him. Before long he'll begin to improve them. I tell you, Jim, I'm as certain of it as I ever was of anything in my life that he's going to revolutionise our conceptions and use of electricity. Once he gets going we're going to learn more in a few years than we've learned in the hundred and fifty since Volta made his battery. I can't see, no one can see, what changes he may bring about. Not just here, Jim, not just in England, but all over the world. It's going to be tremendous, I know it. And it's up to us to see that he has the best start we can give him."
'I think now that I made a tactical error in putting it to him like that. It might have been better if I had taken his own ideas for Ted and worked him up to broader views by degrees. Sprung on him like that, it just didn't register properly. In his own mind he probably put it down as a crazy idea. A suggestion that the boy might become locally important would have carried more weight. He shook his head.
' "Tha knows there's no money to send our Ted to college, Doctor."
' "Not much difficulty in raising it for a boy like him," I said.
' "What, borrow on the chance of 'is payin' it back when 'e 'ad a job? 'Oo's goin' to lend like that—'e might never 'ave a job, there's plenty as 'asn't; then what?"
' "No fear of that."
' "You can say so, but you can't be sure. I don't like it. I've always paid my way and owed nobody owt. It'd be a fine thing if I was to borrow for the lad and leave 'im to find t'money to pay back. Might take 'im years. 'Amperin' not 'elpin', that'd be. No, 'e shall 'ave the best I can give 'im, but what I can't, 'e shan't 'ave; and that's flat.'
And flat it remained. No amount of reasoning or argument did anything but confirm him in what to his eyes was the decent, self-respecting course. When at last I was forced to recognise the hopelessness of converting him I tried to tell myself that in the long run it would make little difference—a bit more slogging, more time wasted in beginning, but the same later on—yet at the back of my mind I knew that wasn't the whole thing.
'Young Ted developed well, with all his father's sturdiness, a good share of the local commonsense outlook, and an amiable enough disposition. He held his place easily at school, not, I think, because his brain was anything but average, but because it was still in advance, though to a less extent, of his years. He got on well enough with the others and was frequently to be seen roving the town as a member of a gang of his own age or playing with them in the Irkwell Urban District Gardens. One was glad that, superficially, his interests seemed quite dully normal.
'In his eleventh and twelfth years, when I had feared he might want to forsake my company entirely for that of his gang, I still managed to see quite a lot of him—largely because he liked to come out in my car, I fancy—and it was when he was nearly twelve that I got a hint of something which bowled my imagination over.
'We were out late. My car had run a big-end up on the moors miles from anywhere. We had reached a main road and at last succeeded in getting a lift part of the way home, but we were left with five miles to cover and only our feet to carry us. It was a fine summer night and about as warm as it ever is on top of the hills. We had been going for some twenty minutes when Ted took off his cap and with it the copper shield which he wore concealed in the lining.
' "It's stopped," he said.
'I knew without asking that he meant that the B.B.C. middle and long-wave stations had closed down, and most of the powerful foreigners, too.
' "After midnight, then," I said.
' "Aye."
'We trudged on without speaking for a while. I knew that he was ranging about that queer electrical landscape of his, aware of things I should never know. And never had I been so—well, so jealous, I suppose it was, of his power as I was at that moment. Just then I felt that I would have given anything that could be asked of me just for a glimpse of the world through his sixth sense—just a glimpse, no matter how brief, so that I could begin to understand.