Other Times, Other Worlds

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...”

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.

When Folmer had finished, Janks said, “I’m turning you over to Robertson for a psycho.”

“Don’t be a fool, Burt! Give me a chance to prove it first!” Folmer pleaded.

“Prove that nonsense! How?”

“Will you grant that if any part of my story is true, all of it is true?”

Janks shrugged. “Sure.”

“Then do this one thing, Burt. The kid’ll be coming out of conference in about ten minutes. He’ll go along the big corridor and take the elevator up to his apartment level. Meet him in the corridor, walk up to him and pretend that you are going to slap him. Your guards will be with you. You’re the only man who could try such a thing and get away with it.”

Janks stretched lazily. “I’d enjoy batting the little jerk’s ears back. Maybe I won’t pretend.”

Ten minutes later Janks stood beside Folmer. They leaned against the wall of the corridor. The door at the end opened and Billy came out, closely followed by the two young guards who were always with him whenever he was out of his apartment. Billy walked slowly and steadily, no expression on his small-boy face, no glint of light in his ancient gray eyes.

Janks said, “Here goes,” and walked out to intercept them. He nodded at the guards, drew one hand back as though to strike the boy. For a second Janks stood motionless. Then he went backward with odd, wooden steps, his back slamming against the corridor wall with a force that nearly knocked him off his feet. Billy stared at him for a moment without expression before continuing toward his apartment. The two guards stood with their mouths open, staring at Janks, and then hurried to their proper position a few feet behind William Massner.

Janks was pale. He looked toward the small figure of Billy, turned to Folmer and said, “Come on. We’ll report to W. W. Gates.”

Gates was an unhappy man. He had been a reasonably competent physicist, blessed with a charming personality and an ability to handle administrative details. As a consequence, he was no longer permitted to do research, but had become the buffer between the military and the research staff. His nominal position was head of research, but his time was spent on reports in quadruplicate and in soothing the battered sensibilities of the research staff. Gates loved his profession and continually told himself that he was helping it more by staying out of it. His rationalization didn’t make him feel any better. He looked like a bald John L. Lewis without the eyebrows. And without the voice. Gates talked in a plaintive squeak.

He sat very still and listened while Folmer told the complete story and Janks substantiated it. Little beads of sweat appeared on Gates’ upper lip in spite of the air-conditioning.

He said slowly, “If I had never sat in on the conferences, I wouldn’t believe it. Science has believed that the future is the result of an infinite progression of possibilities and probabilities with a factor of complete randomness. If you quoted him properly, Folmer, this time-rhythm he spoke of indicates some kind of a pattern in the randomness, so that if you can isolate all the possibilities and probabilities and determine the past rhythm, you can extend that pattern. It’s sort of a statistical approach to metaphysics and quite beyond our current science. I wish you hadn’t told me.”

“I’ve got an idea, sir,” Folmer said. Both men looked at him. “I’ve spent a long time watching the kid. This reading the future is okay for big stuff, but little things fool him. Once he stumbled and fell against a door. Another time one of the men accidentally tramped on his foot. It hurt the kid.”

“What does that mean?” Janks said.

“It means that the kid can avoid big stuff if he wants to, but not minor accidents. I don’t think we can carry this much further. The three of us right here are carrying the ball. It’s up to us. The future is locked up in the kid’s mind. Now, here’s what we do...”

Corporal Alice Dentro was nervous. She knew that she had to forget her personal fears and carry out her orders. An order was an order, wasn’t it? She was in the army, wasn’t she? After all, her superiors must know what they’re doing.

She aimlessly dusted the furniture and glanced toward the chair where William Massner sat motionless, staring at a blank wall. Her lips were tight, and little droplets of cold sweat trickled down her body. She moved constantly closer to the boy. Five feet from him, she reached into her blouse pocket and pulled out the hypodermic. It slid easily out of the aseptic plastic case. Quickly she held it up to the light, depressed the plunger until a drop of the clear liquid appeared at the needly tip.

A few feet closer. Now she could reach out and touch him. He didn’t move. She held herself very still, the needle poised. A quick thrust. The boy jumped as the needle slid through the fabric of his sleeve and penetrated the smooth skin. She pushed the plunger before he twisted away. She backed across the room, dropping the hypodermic. It glistened against the thick pile of the rug. She stood with her back against the door. Billy tried to stand, but slumped back. In a few seconds his chin dropped on his chest, and he began to snore softly.

She glanced at her watch. With a trembling hand she unlocked the door. Gates, Janks and Folmer came in quickly and quietly. With them was Dr. Badloe from the infirmary. He carried a small black case. Janks nodded at Alice Dentro. She slipped out into the corridor and walked quickly away, her shoulders squared. Behind her she heard the click of the lock on the steel door.

As the results of the first drug went away, Billy was given small increments of a derivative of scopolamine. They had turned his chair around, loosened his clothing. Only one light shone in the apartment. It was directed at his face. Dr. Badloe sat near him, fingers on the boy’s pulse. Janks, Gates and Folmer stood just outside the circle of light.

“He’s ready now,” Badloe said. “Just one of you ask the questions.”

Both Janks and Folmer looked at Gates. He nodded. In his thin, high voice he said, “Billy, is it true that you can read the future?”

The small lips twitched. In a small, sleepy voice Billy said, “Yes. Not every aspect of the future. Merely those segments of it which interest me. The method is subject to a standard margin of error.”

“Can you explain that margin of error?” Gates asked.

“Yes. One segment of the future concerns my relationship with this organization. My study of the future indicated that Folmer, knowing my ability to read the future, would interest others and that a successful attempt would be made to render me powerless to keep my readings to myself.”

The three men stared at each other in sudden shock. Gates, with a quaver in his voice said, “Then you knew that we would — do this thing?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you anticipate it and avoid it?”

“To do so would have been to alter the future,” the sleepy voice responded.

“Are you a mutation caused by atomic radiation?”

“No.”

“What are you?”

“A direct evolutionary product. There are precedents in history. The man who devised the bow and arrow is a case in point. He was necessary to humanity because otherwise humanity would not have survived. He was more capable than his fellows.” The boy’s droning voice halted.

“Are we to assume then that your existence is necessary to the survival of humanity?” Gates questioned.

“Yes. The factor missing from man’s intellect is the ability to read the future. To do so requires a more lucid mind than has hitherto existed. The use of atomic energy makes a knowledge of the future indispensable to survival. Thus evolution has provided humanity with a new species of man able to anticipate the results of his own actions.”

“Will we be attacked?”

“Of course. And you will counterattack again and again. As a result of this plan of yours, you hope to be able to attack first, but your military won’t credit my ability to see into the future.”

“When will the attack come?” Gates prodded.

“No less than forty, not more than fifty-two days from today. Minor variables that cannot be properly estimated give that margin for error.”

“Who will win?”

“Win? There will be no victory. That is the essential point. In the past the wars between city states ceased because the city states became too small as social units in a shrinking world. Today a country is too small a social unit. This war will be the terminal point for inter-country warfare, as it will dissolve all financial, linguistic and religious barriers.”

“What will the population of the world be when this war is over?” was Gates’ next question.

“Between fifty and a hundred and fifty millions. There will be an additional fifty per cent shrinkage due to disease before population begins to climb again.”

There was silence in the darkened room. The boy sat motionless, awaiting the next query. Badloe had taken his fingers from the boy’s pulse and sat with his face in his hands.

Gates said slowly, “I don’t understand. You spoke as though your type of individual has come into the world as an evolutionary answer to atomics. If this war will happen, in what sense are you saving mankind?”

“My influence is zero at this point,” was the boy’s answer. “I will be ready when the war is over. I will survive it, because I can anticipate the precautions to be taken. After it is over the ability to read the future will keep mankind from branching off into a repetition of militarism and fear. I have no part in this conflict.” _

“But you have improved our techniques!” Gates protested.

“I have increased your ability to destroy,” Billy corrected him. “Were I to increase it further, you would be enabled to make the earth completely uninhabitable.”

“Then your work is through?”

“Obviously. The result of the drug you have administered to me will be to impair the use of my intellect. I will be sent away. My abilities will return in sufficient time to enable me to survive.”

Gates’ voice became a whisper. “Are there others like you?”

“I estimate that there are at least twenty in the world today. Obviously many have managed to conceal their gifts. The oldest should be not more than nine. They are scattered all over the earth. They all have an excellent chance of survival. Thirty years from now there will be more than a thousand of us.”

Gates glanced over at Janks, saw the fear and the obvious question. Folmer had the same expression on his face. With a voice that had in it a small touch of madness, Gates said, “What is the future of those of us in this room? Will we survive?”

“I have not explored the related probabilities. I knew in New York that it was necessary for Folmer to survive to bring me here and to tell you of my abilities. It can be calculated.”

“Now?”

“Give me thirty seconds.”

Again the room the room was silent. Badloe had lifted his face, his eyes naked with fear. Janks shifted uneasily. Folmer stood, barely breathing. Gates twisted his Fingers together. The seconds ticked by. Four men waited for the word of death or life.

Billy Massner licked his lips. “Not one of you will live more than three months from this date.” It was a flat, calm statement. Badloe made a sound in his throat.

“He’s crazy!” Janks snarled.

They wanted to believe Janks. They had to believe the boy.

Gates whispered, “How will we die?”

They watched the small-boy face. Slowly the impassivity of it melted away. The gray eyes opened and they were not the dead gray eyes the men had grown accustomed to. They were the frightened eyes of boyhood. There was fear on the small face. Fear and indecision.

The voice had lost its flat and deadly calm.

“Who are you?” the boy asked, close to tears. “What do you want? What are you doing to me? I want to go home!”

In the darkened room four men stood and watched a small boy cry.