The Fourth R Read online

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  THE FOURTH "R"

  By George O. Smith

  Published byDELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.1 Dag Hammarskjold PlazaNew York, New York 10017

  Copyright 1959, by George O. SmithAll rights reserved. For information contact:Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  First Dell printing--April 1979

  [Transcribers note: This is a rule 6 clearance. A copyright renewal hasnot been found.]

  BOOK ONE:

  FUTURE IMPROMPTU

  CHAPTER ONE

  James Quincy Holden was five years old.

  His fifth birthday was not celebrated by the usual horde of noisy, hungrykids running wild in the afternoon. It started at seven, with cocktails.They were served by his host, Paul Brennan, to the celebrants, the boy'sfather and mother. The guest of honor sipped ginger ale and nibbled atcanapes while he was presented with his gifts: A volume of Kipling's_Jungle Tales_, a Spitz Junior Planetarium, and a build-it-yourself kitcontaining parts for a geiger counter and an assortment of radioactiveminerals to identify. Dinner was served at eight, the menu selected byJimmy Holden--with the exception of the birthday cake and its five proudlittle candles which came as an anticipated surprise from his "Uncle"Paul Brennan.

  After dinner, they listened to some music chosen by the boy, and theevening wound up with three rubbers of bridge. The boy won.

  They left Paul Brennan's apartment just after eleven o'clock. JimmyHolden was tired and pleasantly stuffed with good food. But he wasstimulated by the party. So, instead of dropping off to sleep, he satcomfortably wedged between his father and mother, quietly lost in his ownthoughts until the car was well out of town.

  Then he said, "Dad, why did you make that sacrifice bid on the lasthand?" Father and son had been partners.

  "You're not concerned about losing the rubber, are you?" It had been theonly rubber Jimmy lost.

  "No. It's only a game," said Jimmy. "I'm just trying to understand."

  His father gave an amused groan. "It has to do with the laws ofprobability and the theory of games," he said.

  The boy shook his head. "Bridge," he said thoughtfully, "consists ofcreating a logical process of play out of a random distribution ofvalues, doesn't it?"

  "Yes, if you admit that your definition is a gross oversimplification. Itwould hardly be a game if everything could be calculated beforehand."

  "But what's missing?"

  "In any game there is the element of a calculated risk."

  Jimmy Holden was silent for a half-mile thinking that one over. "How," heasked slowly, "can a risk be calculated?"

  His father laughed. "In fine, it can't. Too much depends upon thepersonality of the individual."

  "Seems to me," said Jimmy, "that there's not much point in making a bidagainst a distribution of values known to be superior. You couldn't hopeto make it; Mother and Uncle Paul had the cards."

  His father laughed again. "After a few more courses in highermathematics, James, you'll begin to realize that some of the highestmathematics is aimed at predicting the unpredictable, or trying to lowerthe entropy of random behavior--"

  Jimmy Holden's mother chuckled. "Now explain entropy," she said. "James,what your father has been failing to explain is really not subject tosimple analysis. Who knows why any man will hazard his hard-earned moneyon the orientation of a pair of dice? No amount of education nor academicstudy will explain what drives a man. Deep inside, I suppose it is thesame force that drives everybody. One man with four spades will take achance to see if he can make five, and another man with directorships inthree corporations will strive to make it four."

  Jimmy's father chuckled. "Some families with one infant will try to makeit two--"

  "Not on your life!"

  "--And some others are satisfied with what they've got," finished JimmyHolden's father. "James, some men will avoid seeing what has to be done;some men will see it and do it and do no more; and a few men will seewhat has to be done, do it, and then look to the next inevitable problemcreated by their own act--"

  A blinding flash of light cut a swath across the road, dazzling them.Around the curve ahead, a car careened wide over the white line. Hismother reached for him, his father fought the wheel to avoid the crash.Jimmy Holden both heard and felt the sharp _Bang!_ as the right fronttire went. The steering wheel snapped through his father's hands by halfa turn. There was a splintering crash as the car shattered its waythrough the retaining fence, then came a fleeting moment of breathlesssilence as if the entire universe had stopped still for a heartbeat.

  Chaos! His mother's automatic scream, his father's oath, and the rendingcrash split the silence at once. The car bucked and flipped, the doorswere slammed open and ripped off against a tree that went down. The carleaped in a skew turn and began to roll and roll, shedding metal andhumans as it racketed down the ravine.

  Jimmy felt himself thrown free in a tumbleturn that ended in a heavythud.

  * * * * *

  When breath and awareness returned, he was lying in a depression filledwith soft rotting leaves.

  He was dazed beyond hurt. The initial shock and bewilderment oozed out ofhim, leaving him with a feeling of outrage, and a most peculiar sensationof being a spectator rather than an important part of the violent drama.It held an air of unreality, like a dream that the near-conscious sleeperrecognizes as a dream and lives through it because he lacks the consciouswill to direct it.

  Strangely, it was as if there were three or more of him all thinkingdifferent things at the same time. He wanted his mother badly enough tocry. Another part of him said that she would certainly be at his side ifshe were able. Then a third section of his confused mind pointed out thatif she did not come to him, it was because she herself was hurt deeplyand couldn't.

  A more coldly logical portion of his mind was urging him to get up and_do_ something about it. They had passed a telephone booth on thehighway; lying there whimpering wasn't doing anybody any good. Thislogical part of his confused mind did not supply the dime for thetelephone slot nor the means of scaling the heights needed to insertthe dime in the adult-altitude machine.

  Whether the dazzle of mental activity was serial or simultaneous isn'timportant. The fact is that it was completely disorganized as to planor program, it leaped from one subject to another until he heard thescrabble and scratch of someone climbing down the side of the ravine.

  Any noise meant help. With relief, Jimmy tried to call out.

  But with this arrival of help, afterfright claimed him. His mouthworked silently before a dead-dry throat and his muscles twitched inuncontrolled nervousness; he made neither sound nor motion. Again hewatched with the unreal feeling of being a remote spectator. A cone oflight from a flashlight darted about and it gradually seeped into Jimmy'sshocked senses that this was a new arrival, picking his way through thetangle of brush, following the trail of ruin from the broken guard railto the smashed car below.

  The newcomer paused. The light darted forward to fall upon a crumpledmass of cloth.

  With a toe, the stranger probed at crushed ribs. A pitifully feeblemoan came from the broken rag doll that lay on the ground. The searcherknelt with his light close to peer into the bloody face, and,unbelieving, Jimmy Holden heard the voice of his mother strainingto speak, "Paul--I--we--"

  The voice died in a gurgle.

  The man with the flashlight tested the flaccid neck by bending the headto one side and back sharply. He ended this inspection by letting thehead fall back to the moist earth. It landed with a thud of finality.

  The cold brutality of this st
ranger's treatment of his mother shockedJimmy Holden into frantic outrage. The frozen cry for help changed intoprotesting anger; no one should be treated that--

  "One!" muttered the stranger flatly.

  Jimmy's burst of protest died in his throat and he watched, fascinated,as the stranger's light moved in a sweep forward to stop a second time."And there's number two!" The callous horror was repeated. Hypnotically,Jimmy Holden watched the stranger test the temples and wrists and try ahand under his father's heart. He watched the stranger make a detailedinspection of the long slash that laid open the entire left abdomen andhe saw the red that seeped but did not flow.

  "That's that!" said the stranger with an air of finality. "Now--" and hestood up to swing his flashlight in widening circles, searching the areacarefully.

  * * * * *

  Jimmy Holden did not sicken. He went cold. He froze as the dancingflashlight passed over his head, and relaxed partially when it movedaway in a series of little jumps pausing to give a steady light forclose inspection. The light swung around and centered on the smashedautomobile. It was upside down, a ruin with one wheel still turning idly.

  The stranger went to it, and knelt to peer inside. He pried ripped metalaway to get a clear sight into the crushed interior. He went flat on hisstomach and tried to penetrate the area between the crumpled car-top andthe bruised ground, and he wormed his way in a circle all around the car,examining the wreck minutely.

  The sound of a distant automobile engine became audible, and thesearching man mumbled a curse. With haste he scrambled to his feet andmade a quick inspection of the one wabbly-turning wheel. He stripped afew shards of rubber away, picked at something in the bent metal rim, andput whatever he found in his pocket. When his hand came from the pocketit held a packet of paper matches. With an ear cocked at the road aboveand the sound of the approaching car growing louder, the stranger struckone match and touched it to the deck of matches. Then with a callousgesture he tossed the flaring pack into a pool of spilled gasoline. Thefuel went up in a blunt _whoosh_!

  The dancing flames revealed the face of Jimmy Holden's "Uncle" PaulBrennan, his features in a mask that Jimmy Holden had never seen before.

  With the determined air of one who knows that still another piece lieshidden, Paul Brennan started to beat back and forth across the trail ofruin. His light swept the ground like the brush of a painter, missing nospot. Slowly and deliberately he went, paying no attention to thecreeping tongues of flame that crept along damp trails of spilledgasoline.

  Jimmy Holden felt helplessly alone.

  For "Uncle" Paul Brennan was the laughing uncle, the golden uncle; hisgodfather; the bringer of delightful gifts and the teller of fabulousstories. Classmate of his father and admirer of his mother, a friend tobe trusted as he trusted his father and mother, as they trusted PaulBrennan. Jimmy Holden did not and could not understand, but he could feelthe presence of menace. And so with the instinct of any trapped animal,he curled inward upon himself and cringed.

  Education and information failed. Jimmy Holden had been told and told andinstructed, and the words had been graven deep in his mind by the samefabulous machine that his father used to teach him his grammar and hisvocabulary and his arithmetic and the horde of other things that madeJimmy Holden what he was: "If anything happens to us, you must turn toPaul Brennan!"

  But nothing in his wealth of extraordinary knowledge covered the way tosafety when the trusted friend turned fiend.

  * * * * *

  Shaken by the awful knowledge that all of his props had been kicked outfrom under him, now at last Jimmy Holden whimpered in helpless fright.Brennan turned towards the sound and began to beat his way through theunderbrush.

  Jimmy Holden saw him coming. It was like one of those dreams he'd hadwhere he was unable to move, his muscles frozen, as some unknown horrorstalked him. It could only end in a terrifying fall through cold spacetowards a tremendous lurch against the bedsprings that brought littlecomfort until his pounding heart came back to normal. But this was nodream; it was a known horror that stalked him, and it could not end asa dream ends. It was reality.

  The horror was a close friend turned animal, and the end was morehorrible because Jimmy Holden, like all other five-year-olds, hadabsolutely no understanding nor accurate grasp of the concept called_death_. He continued to whimper even though he realized that his frightwas pointing him out to his enemy. And yet he had no real grasp of theconcept _enemy_. He knew about pain; he had been hurt. But only by falls,simple misadventures, the needles of inoculation administered by hissurgeon mother, a paddling for mischief by his engineer father.

  But whatever unknown fate was coming was going to be worse than "hurt."It was frightful.

  Then fate, assisted by Brennan's own act of trying to obliterate anypossible evidence by fire, attracted a savior. The approaching carstopped on the road above and a voice called out, "Hello, down there!"

  Brennan could not refuse to answer; his own car was in plain sight by theshattered retaining fence. He growled under his breath, but he calledback, "Hello, the road! Go get the police!"

  "Can we help?"

  "Beyond help!" cried Brennan. "I'm all right. Get the cops!"

  The car door slammed before it took off. Then came the unmistakablesounds of another man climbing down the ravine. A second flashlight swunghere and there until the newcomer faced Brennan in the little circle oflight.

  "What happened?" asked the uninvited volunteer.

  Brennan, whatever his thoughts, said in a voice filled with standardconcern: "Blowout. Then everything went blooey."

  "Anyone--I mean how many--?"

  "Two dead," said Brennan, and then added because he had to, "and a littleboy lost."

  The stranger eyed the flames and shuddered. "In there?"

  "Parents were tossed out. Boy's missing."

  "Bad," said the stranger. "God, what a mess. Know 'em?"

  "Holdens. Folks that live in the big old house on the hill. My bestfriend and his wife. I was following them home," lied Brennan glibly."C'mon let's see if we can find the kid. What about the police?"

  "Sent my wife. Telephone down the road."

  Paul Brennan's reply carried no sound of disappointment over beinginterrupted. "Okay. Let's take a look. You take it that way, and I'llcover this side."

  The little-boy mind did not need its extensive education to understandthat Paul Brennan needed no more than a few seconds of unobservedactivity, after which he could announce the discovery of the third deathin a voice cracked with false grief.

  Animal instinct took over where intelligence failed. The same force thatcaused Jimmy Holden to curl within himself now caused him to relax; helpthat could be trusted was now at hand. The muscles of his throat relaxed.He whimpered. The icy paralysis left his arms and legs; he kicked andflailed. And finally his nervous system succeeded in making their contactwith his brain; the nerves carried the pain of his bumps and scratches,and Jimmy Holden began to hurt. His stifled whimper broke into ashuddering cry, which swiftly turned into sobbing hysteria.

  He went out of control. Nothing, not even violence, would shake him backuntil his accumulation of shock upon shock had been washed away in tears.

  The sound attracted both men. Side by side they beat through theunderbrush. They reached for him and Jimmy turned toward the stranger.The man picked the lad out of the bed of soft rotting leaves, cradled himand stroked his head. Jimmy wrapped his small arms around the stranger'sneck and held on for life.

  "I'll take him," said Brennan, reaching out.

  Jimmy's clutch on the stranger tightened.

  "You won't pry him loose easily," chuckled the man. "I know. I've got acouple of these myself."

  Brennan shrugged. "I thought perhaps--"

  "Forget it," said the stranger. "Kid's had trouble. I'll carry him to theroad, you take him from there."

  "Okay."

  Getting up the ravine was a job of work for the man
who carried JimmyHolden. Brennan gave a hand, aided with a lift, broke down brush, andoffered to take Jimmy now and again. Jimmy only clung tighter, and thestranger waved Brennan away with a quick shake of his head.

  By the time they reached the road, sirens were wailing on the road upthe hill. Police, firemen, and an ambulance swarmed over the scene. Thefiremen went to work on the flaming car with practiced efficiency; thepolice clustered around Paul Brennan and extracted from him a story thathad enough truth in it to sound completely convincing. The doctors fromthe ambulance took charge of Jimmy Holden. Lacking any other accidentvictim, they went to work on him with everything they could do.

  They gave him mild sedation, wrapped him in a warm blanket, and put himto bed on the cot in the ambulance with two of them watching over him. Inthe presence of so many solicitous strangers, Jimmy's shock and frightdiminished. The sedation took hold. He dropped off in a light doze thatgrew less fitful as time went on. By the time the official accidentreport program was over, Jimmy Holden was fast asleep and restingcomfortably.

  He did not hear Paul Brennan's suggestion that Jimmy go home with him,to Paul Brennan's personal physician, nor did Jimmy hear the ambulanceattendants turn away Brennan's suggestion with hard-headed medicalopinion. Brennan could hardly argue with the fact that an accident victimwould be better off in a hospital under close observation. Shock demandedit, and there was the hidden possibility of internal injury or concussionto consider.

  So Jimmy Holden awoke with his accident ten hours behind him, and thegood sleep had completed the standard recuperative powers of the healthychild. He looked around, collecting himself, and then remembered theaccident. He cringed a bit and took another look and identified hissurroundings as some sort of a children's ward or dormitory.

  He was in a crib.

  He sat up angrily and rattled the gate of the crib. Putting James QuincyHolden in a baby's crib was an insult.

  He stopped, because the noise echoed through the room and one of theyounger patients stirred in sleep and moaned. Jimmy Holden sat back andremembered. The vacuum that was to follow the loss of his parents was notyet in evidence. They were gone and the knowledge made him unhappy, buthe was not cognizant of the real meaning or emotion of grief. With almostthe same feeling of loss he thought of the _Jungle Book_ he would neverread and the Spitz Planetarium he would never see casting its little starimages on his bedroom ceiling. Burned and ruined, with the atomic energykit--and he had hoped that he could use the kit to tease his father intogiving him some education in radioactivity. He was old enough to learn--

  Learn--?

  _No more, now that his father and mother were dead._

  Some of the real meaning of his loss came to him then, and the growingknowledge that this first shocking loss meant the ultimate loss ofeverything was beginning to sink in.

  He broke down and cried in the misery of his loss and his helplessness;ultimately his emotion began to cry itself out, and he began to feelresentment against his position. The animal desire to bite back atanything that moved did not last long, it focused properly upon theperson of his tormentor. Then for a time, Jimmy Holden's imaginationindulged in a series of little vignettes in which he scored his victoryover Paul Brennan. These little playlets went through their ownevolution, starting with physical victory reminiscent of hisJack-and-the-Beanstalk days to a more advanced triumph of watching PaulBrennan led away in handcuffs whilst the District Attorney scanned thesheaf of indisputable evidence provided by James Quincy Holden.

  Somewhere along about this point in his fantasy, a breath of thepractical entered, and Jimmy began to consider the more sensible problemof what sort of information this sheaf of evidence would contain.

  Still identifying himself with the books he knew, Jimmy Holden hadprogressed from the fairy story--where the villain was evil for no moremotive than to provide menace to the hero--to his more advanced books,where the villain did his evil deeds for the logical motive of personalgain.

  Well, what had Paul Brennan to gain?

  Money, for one thing--he would be executor of the Holden Estate. Butthere wasn't enough to justify killing. Revenge? For what? Jealousy? Forwhom? Hate? Envy? Jimmy Holden glossed the words quickly, for they wereno more than words that carried definitions that did not really explainthem. He could read with the facility of an adult, but a book written fora sophisticated audience went over his head.

  No, there was only one possible thing of appreciable value; the one thingthat Paul Brennan hoped to gain was the device over which they had workedthrough all the long years to perfect: The Holden ElectromechanicalEducator! Brennan wanted it badly enough to murder for its possession!

  And with a mind and ingenuity far beyond his years, Jimmy Holden knewthat he alone was the most active operator in this vicious drama. It wasnot without shock that he realized that he himself could still be killedto gain possession of his fabulous machine. For only with all _three_Holdens dead could Paul Brennan take full and unquestioned possession.

  * * * * *

  With daylight clarity he knew what he had to do. In a single act ofdestruction he could simultaneously foil Paul Brennan's plan and ensurehis own life.

  Permanently installed in Jimmy Holden's brain by the machine itself werethe full details of how to recreate it. Indelibly he knew each wire andlink, lever and coil, section by section and piece by piece. It wasincomprehensible information, about in the same way that the printingpress "knows" the context of its metal plate. Step by step he couldrebuild it once he had the means of procuring the parts, and it wouldwork even though he had not the foggiest notion (now) of what the variousparts did.

  So if the delicate heart of his father's machine were utterly destroyed,Paul Brennan would be extremely careful about preserving the life ofJames Quincy Holden.

  He considered his position and what he knew:

  Physically, he was a five-year-old. He stood forty-one inches tall andweighed thirty-nine pounds. A machinist's hammer was a two-handed tooland a five-pound sack of sugar was a burden. Doorknobs and latches were aproblem in manipulation. The negotiation of a swinging door was a feat ofmuscular engineering. Electric light switches were placed at a tiptoereach because, naturally, everything in the adult world is designed bythe adults for the convenience of adults. This makes it difficult for thechild who has no adult to do his bidding.

  Intellectually, Jimmy Holden was something else.

  Reverting to a curriculum considered sound prior to Mr. Dewey'soften-questionable and more often misused programs of schooling, Jimmy'sparents had trained and educated their young man quite well in theprimary informations of fact. He read with facility and spoke with a finevocabulary--although no amount of intellectual training could make hisvoice change until his glands did. His knowledge of history, geographyand literature were good, because he'd used them to study reading. He waswell into plane geometry and had a smattering of algebra, and there hadbeen a pause due to a parental argument as to the advisability of hismemorizing a table of six-place logarithms via the Holden machine.

  Extra-curricularly, Jimmy Holden had acquired snippets, bits, andwholesale chunks of a number of the arts and sciences and otheraggregations of information both pertinent and trivial for one reasonor another. As an instance, he had absorbed an entire bridge book byCharles Goren just to provide a fourth to sit in with his parents andPaul Brennan.

  Consequently, James Holden had in data the education of a boy of aboutsixteen, and in other respects, much more.

  He escaped from the hospital simply because no one ever thought that afive-year-old boy would have enough get-up-and-go to climb out of hiscrib, rummage a nearby closet, dress himself, and then calmly walk out.The clothing of a cocky teen-ager would have been impounded and hisbehavior watched.

  They did not miss him for hours. He went, taking the littleidentification card from its frame at the foot of his bed--and thatruined the correlation between tag and patient.

  By the time an overworked nurse
stopped to think and finally asked,"Kitty, are you taking care of the little boy in Bed 6 over in 219?" andreceived the answer, "No, aren't you?" Jimmy Holden was trudging up thehill towards his home. Another hour went by with the two worried nursessurreptitiously searching the rest of the hospital in the simple hopethat he had wandered away and could be restored before it came to theattention of the officials. By the time they gave up and called in othernurses (who helped them in their anxiety to conceal) Jimmy was enteringhis home.

  Each succeeding level of authority was loath to report the truth to thenext higher up.

  By the time the general manager of the hospital forced himself to callPaul Brennan, Jimmy Holden was demolishing the last broken bits ofdisassembled subassemblies he had smashed from the heart-circuit of theHolden Electromechanical Educator. He was most thorough. Broken glasswent into the refuse buckets, bent metal was buried in the garden,inflammables were incinerated, and meltables and fusibles slagged down inashes that held glass, bottle, and empty tin-can in an unrecognizablemass. He left a gaping hole in the machine that Brennan could notfill--nor could any living man fill it now but James Quincy Holden.

  And only when this destruction was complete did Jimmy Holden first beginto understand his father's statement about the few men who see what hasto be done, do it, _and then_ look to the next inevitable problem createdby their own act.

  It was late afternoon by the time Jimmy had his next moves figured out.He left the home he'd grown up in, the home of his parents, of his ownbabyhood. He'd wandered through it for the last time, touching this andsaying goodbye to that. He was certain that he would never see his thingsagain, nor the house itself, but the real vacuum of his loss hadn't yetstarted to form. The concepts of "never" and "forever" were merely wordsthat had no real impact.

  So was the word "Farewell."

  But once his words were said, Jimmy Holden made his small but confidentway to the window of a railroad ticket agent.