New Folks' Home: And Other Stories

  “Scratchy, sir?”

  “Sure. You know. Bristly. So it scratches when you rub your face against it.”

  “But no one in his right mind would want to rub his face …”

  “I would,” said Andrew Young. “I fully intend to do so.”

  “As you wish, sir,” the technician answered, beaten now.

  “When you get it done,” said Young, “I have some other things in mind.”

  “Other things?” The technician looked wildly about, as if seeking some escape.

  “A high chair,” said Young. “And a crib. And a wooly dog. And buttons.”

  “Buttons?” asked the technician. “What are buttons?”

  “I’ll explain it all to you,” Young told him airily. “It all is very simple.”

  It seemed, when Andrew Young came into the room, that Riggs and Stanford had been expecting him, had known that he was coming and had been waiting for him.

  He wasted no time on preliminaries or formalities.

  They know, he told himself. They know, or they have guessed. They would be watching me. Ever since I brought in my petition, they have been watching me, wondering what I would be thinking, trying to puzzle out what I might do next. They know every move I’ve made, they know about the toys and the furniture and all the other things. And I don’t need to tell them what I plan to do.

  “I need some help,” he said, and they nodded soberly, as if they had guessed he needed help.

  “I want to build a house,” he explained. “A big house. Much larger than the usual house.”

  Riggs said, “We’ll draw the plans for you. Do anything else that you—”

  “A house,” Young went on, “About four or five times as big as the ordinary house. Four or five times normal scale, I mean. Doors twenty-five to thirty feet high and everything else in proportion.”

  “Neighbors or privacy?” asked Stanford.

  “Privacy,” said Young.

  “We’ll take care of it,” promised Riggs. “Leave the matter of the house to us.”

  Young stood for a long moment, looking at the two of them. Then he said, “I thank you, gentlemen. I thank you for your helpfulness and your understanding. But most of all I thank you for not asking any questions.”

  He turned slowly and walked out of the room and they sat in silence for minutes after he was gone.

  Finally, Stanford offered a deduction: “It will have to be a place that a boy would like. Woods to run in and a little stream to fish in and a field where he can fly his kites. What else could it be?”

  “He’s been out ordering children’s furniture and toys,” Riggs agreed. “Stuff from five thousand years ago. The kind of things he used when he was a child. But scaled to adult size.”

  “Now,” said Stanford, “he wants a house built to the same proportions. A house that will make him think or help him believe that he is a child. But will it work, Riggs? His body will not change. He cannot make it change. It will only be in his mind.”

  “Illusion,” declared Riggs. “The illusion of bigness in relation to himself. To a child, creeping on the floor, a door is twenty-five to thirty feet high, relatively. Of course the child doesn’t know that. But Andrew Young does. I don’t see how he’ll overcome that.”

  “At first,” suggested Stanford, “he will know that it’s illusion, but after a time, isn’t there a possibility that it will become reality so far as he’s concerned? That’s why he needs our help. So that the house will not be firmly planted in his memory as a thing that’s merely out of proportion … so that it will slide from illusion into reality without too great a strain.”

  “We must keep our mouths shut.” Riggs nodded soberly. “There must be no interference. It’s a thing he must do himself … entirely by himself. Our help with the house must be the help of an unseen, silent agency. Like brownies, I think the term was that he used, we must help and be never seen. Intrusion by anyone would introduce a jarring note and would destroy illusion and that is all he has to work on. Illusion pure and simple.”

  “Others have tried,” objected Stanford, pessimistic again. “Many others. With gadgets and machines …”

  “None has tried it,” said Riggs, “with the power of mind alone. With the sheer determination to wipe out five thousand years of memory.”

  “That will be his stumbling block,” said Stanford. “The old, dead memories are the things he has to beat. He has to get rid of them … not just bury them, but get rid of them for good and all, forever.”

  “He must do more than that,” said Riggs. “He must replace his memories with the outlook he had when he was a child. His mind must be washed out, refreshed, wiped clean and shining and made new again … ready to live another five thousand years.”

  The two men sat and looked at one another and in each other’s eyes they saw a single thought—the day would come when they, too, each of them alone, would face the problem Andrew Young faced.

  “We must help,” said Riggs, “in every way we can and we must keep watch and we must be ready … but Andrew Young cannot know that we are helping or that we are watching him. We must anticipate the materials and tools and the aids that he may need.”

  Stanford started to speak, then hesitated, as if seeking in his mind for the proper words.

  “Yes,” said Riggs. “What is it?”

  “Later on,” Stanford managed to say, “much later on, toward the very end, there is a certain factor that we must supply. The one thing that he will need the most and the one thing that he cannot think about, even in advance. All the rest can be stage setting and he can still go on toward the time when it becomes reality. All the rest may be make-believe, but one thing must come as genuine or the entire effort will collapse in failure.”

  Riggs nodded. “Of course. That’s something we’ll have to work out carefully.”

  “If we can,” Stanford said.

  The yellow button over here and the red one over there and the green one doesn’t fit, so I’ll throw it on the floor and just for the fun of it, I’ll put the pink one in my mouth and someone will find me with it and they’ll raise a ruckus because they will be afraid that I will swallow it.

  And there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that I love better than a full-blown ruckus. Especially if it is over me.

  “Ug,” said Andrew Young, and he swallowed the button.

  He sat stiff and straight in the towering high chair and then, in a fury, swept the oversized muffin tin and its freight of buttons crashing to the floor.

  For a second he felt like weeping in utter frustration and then a sense of shame crept in on him.

  Big baby, he said to himself.

  Crazy to be sitting in an overgrown high chair, playing with buttons and mouthing baby talk and trying to force a mind conditioned by five thousand years of life into the channels of an infant’s thoughts.

  Carefully he disengaged the tray and slid it out, cautiously shinnied down the twelve-foot-high chair.

  The room engulfed him, the ceiling towering far above him.

  The neighbors, he told himself, no doubt thought him crazy, although none of them had said so. Come to think of it, he had not seen any of his neighbors for a long spell now.

  A suspicion came into his mind. Maybe they knew what he was doing, maybe they were deliberately keeping out of his way in order not to embarrass him.

  That, of course, would be what they would do if they had realized what he was about. But he had expected … he had expected … that fellow, what’s his name? … at the commission, what’s the name of that commission, anyhow? Well, anyway, he’d expected a fellow whose name he couldn’t remember from a commission the name of which he could not recall to come snooping around, wondering what he might be up to, offering to help, spoiling the whole setup, everything he’d planned.

  I can’t remember, he c
omplained to himself. I can’t remember the name of a man whose name I knew so short a time ago as yesterday. Nor the name of a commission that I knew as well as I know my name. I’m getting forgetful. I’m getting downright childish.

  Childish?

  Childish!

  Childish and forgetful.

  Good Lord, thought Andrew Young, that’s just the way I want it.

  On hands and knees he scrabbled about and picked up the buttons, put them in his pocket. Then, with the muffin tin underneath his arm, he shinnied up the high chair and, seating himself comfortably, sorted out the buttons in the pan.

  The green one over here in this compartment and the yellow one … oops, there she goes onto the floor. And the red one in with the blue one and this one … this one … what’s the color of this one? Color? What’s that?

  What is what?

  What—

  “It’s almost time,” said Stanford, “and we are ready, as ready as we’ll ever be. We’ll move in when the time is right, but we can’t move in too soon. Better to be a little late than a little early. We have all the things we need. Special size diapers and—”

  “Good Lord,” exclaimed Riggs, “it won’t go that far, will it?”

  “It should,” said Stanford. “It should go even further to work right. He got lost yesterday. One of our men found him and led him home. He didn’t have the slightest idea where he was and he was getting pretty scared and he cried a little. He chattered about birds and flowers and he insisted that our man stay and play with him.”

  Riggs chuckled softly. “Did he?”

  “Oh, certainly. He came back worn to a frazzle.”

  “Food?” asked Riggs. “How is he feeding himself?”

  “We see that there’s a supply of stuff, cookies and such-wise, left on a low shelf, where he can get at them. One of the robots cooks up some more substantial stuff on a regular schedule and leaves it where he can find it. We have to be careful. We can’t mess around too much. We can’t intrude on him. I have a feeling he’s almost reached an actual turning point. We can’t afford to upset things now that he’s come this far.”

  “The android’s ready?”

  “Just about,” said Stanford.

  “And the playmates?”

  “Ready. They were less of a problem.”

  “There’s nothing more that we can do?”

  “Nothing,” Stanford said. “Just wait, that’s all. Young has carried himself this far by the sheer force of will alone. That will is gone now. He can’t consciously force himself any further back. He is more child than adult now. He’s built up a regressive momentum and the only question is whether that momentum is sufficient to carry him all the way back to actual babyhood.”

  “It has to go back to that?” Riggs looked unhappy, obviously thinking of his own future. “You’re only guessing, aren’t you?”

  “All the way or it simply is no good,” Stanford said dogmatically. “He has to get an absolutely fresh start. All the way or nothing.”

  “And if he gets stuck halfway between? Half child, half man, what then?”

  “That’s something I don’t want to think about,” Stanford said.

  He had lost his favorite teddy bear and gone to hunt it in the dusk that was filled with elusive fireflies and the hush of a world quieting down for the time of sleep. The grass was drenched with dew and he felt the cold wetness of it soaking through his shoes as he went from bush to hedge to flowerbed, looking for the missing toy.

  It was necessary, he told himself, that he find the nice little bear, for it was the one that slept with him and if he did not find it, he knew that it would spend a lonely and comfortless night. But at no time did he admit, even to his innermost thought, that it was he who needed the bear and not the bear who needed him.

  A soaring bat swooped low and for a terrified moment, catching sight of the zooming terror, a blob of darkness in the gathering dusk, he squatted low against the ground, huddling against the sudden fear that came out of the night. Sounds of fright bubbled in his throat and now he saw the great dark garden as an unknown place, filled with lurking shadows that lay in wait for him.

  He stayed cowering against the ground and tried to fight off the alien fear that growled from behind each bush and snarled in every darkened corner. But even as the fear washed over him, there was one hidden corner of his mind that knew there was no need of fear. It was as if that one area of his brain still fought against the rest of him, as if that small section of cells might know that the bat was no more than a flying bat, that the shadows in the garden were no more than absence of light.

  There was a reason, he knew, why he should not be afraid—a good reason born of a certain knowledge he no longer had. And that he should have such knowledge seemed unbelievable, for he was scarcely two years old.

  He tried to say it—two years old.

  There was something wrong with his tongue, something the matter with the way he had to use his mouth, with the way his lips refused to shape the words he meant to say.

  He tried to define the words, tried to tell himself what he meant by two years old and one moment it seemed that he knew the meaning of it and then it escaped him.

  The bat came again and he huddled close against the ground, shivering as he crouched. He lifted his eyes fearfully, darting glances here and there, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the looming house and it was a place he knew as refuge.

  “House,” he said, and the word was wrong, not the word itself, but the way he said it.

  He ran on trembling, unsure feet and the great door loomed before him, with the latch too high to reach. But there was another way, a small swinging door built into the big door, the sort of door that is built for cats and dogs and sometimes little children. He darted through it and felt the sureness and the comfort of the house about him. The sureness and the comfort—and the loneliness.

  He found his second-best teddy bear, and, picking it up, clutched it to his breast, sobbing into its scratchy back in pure relief from terror.

  There is something wrong, he thought. Something dreadfully wrong. Something is as it should not be. It is not the garden or the darkened bushes or the swooping winged shape that came out of the night. It is something else, something missing, something that should be here and isn’t.

  Clutching the teddy bear, he sat rigid and tried desperately to drive his mind back along the way that would tell him what was wrong. There was an answer, he was sure of that. There was an answer somewhere; at one time he had recognized the need he felt and there had been no way to supply it—and now he couldn’t even know the need, could feel it, but he could not know it.

  He clutched the bear closer and huddled in the darkness, watching the moonbeam that came through a window, high above his head, and etched a square of floor in brightness.

  Fascinated, he watched the moonbeam and all at once the terror faded. He dropped the bear and crawled on hands and knees, stalking the moonbeam. It did not try to get away and he reached its edge and thrust his hands into it and laughed with glee when his hands were painted by the light coming through the window.

  He lifted his face and stared up at the blackness and saw the white globe of the Moon, looking at him, watching him. The Moon seemed to wink at him and he chortled joyfully.

  Behind him a door creaked open and he turned clumsily around.

  Someone stood in the doorway, almost filling it—a beautiful person who smiled at him. Even in the darkness he could sense the sweetness of the smile, the glory of her golden hair.

  “Time to eat, Andy,” said the woman. “Eat and get a bath and then to bed.”

  Andrew Young hopped joyfully on both feet, arms held out—happy and excited and contented.

  “Mummy!” he cried. “Mummy … Moon!”

  He swung about with a pointing finger and the woman came swiftly ac
ross the floor, knelt and put her arms around him, held him close against her. His cheek against hers, he stared up at the Moon and it was a wondrous thing, a bright and golden thing, a wonder that was shining new and fresh.

  On the street outside, Stanford and Riggs stood looking up at the huge house that towered above the trees.

  “She’s in there now,” said Stanford. “Everything’s quiet so it must be all right.”

  Riggs said, “He was crying in the garden. He ran in terror for the house. He stopped crying about the time she must have come in.”

  Stanford nodded. “I was afraid we were putting it off too long, but I don’t see now how we could have done it sooner. Any outside interference would have shattered the thing he tried to do. He had to really need her. Well, it’s all right now. The timing was just about perfect.”

  “You’re sure, Stanford?”

  “Sure? Certainly I am sure. We created the android and we trained her. We instilled a deep maternal sense into her personality. She knows what to do. She is almost human. She is as close as we could come to a human mother eighteen feet tall. We don’t know what Young’s mother looked like, but chances are he doesn’t either. Over the years his memory has idealized her. That’s what we did. We made an ideal mother.”

  “If it only works,” said Riggs.

  “It will work,” said Stanford, confidently. “Despite the shortcomings we may discover by trial and error, it will work. He’s been fighting himself all this time. Now he can quit fighting and shift responsibility. It’s enough to get him over the final hump, to place him safely and securely in the second childhood that he had to have. Now he can curl up, contented. There is someone to look after him and think for him and take care of him. He’ll probably go back just a little further … a little closer to the cradle. And that is good, for the further he goes, the more memories are erased.”

  “And then?” asked Riggs worriedly.

  “Then he can proceed to grow up again.”

  They stood watching, silently.

  In the enormous house, lights came on in the kitchen and the windows gleamed with a homey brightness.

  I, too, Stanford was thinking. Some day, I, too. Young has pointed the way, he has blazed the path. He had shown us, all the other billions of us, here on Earth and all over the Galaxy, the way it can be done. There will be others and for them there will be more help. We’ll know then how to do it better.