New Folks' Home: And Other Stories

  Charley told him, honestly enough, that he didn’t know what could be done to prevent a war, although he said that the quieting of the Iranian situation and the British monetary announcement might go a long way toward keeping war from happening.

  “You know,” said Cooper Jackson, “I felt the same way, too. That is, after I read the news, I felt that those were two good things to happen.”

  At this point, perhaps, a couple of things should be considered.

  If Charley Porter had been a regular newspaperman instead of copyreader, he might have mentioned the plane wreck and the little girl who hadn’t died, and how it was a funny thing about that coon dog getting out of the cave and how he knew of a man who’d made a mint of money riding in on Midnight.

  But Charley didn’t say these things.

  If Charley had been a regular newspaperman, he might have said to Cooper Jackson: “Look here, kid, I’m on to you. I know what you’re doing. I got it figured out. Maybe you better straighten me out on a point or two, so I’ll have the story right.”

  But Charley didn’t say this. Instead he said that he had heard uptown the night before about Cooper’s miraculous recovery, and he was Cooper Jackson, wasn’t he?

  Yes, Cooper answered, he was Cooper Jackson, and perhaps his recovery was miraculous. No, he said, he didn’t have the least idea of how it came about and Doc Ames didn’t either.

  They parted after an hour or two of talk. Charley didn’t say anything about seeing him again. But the next day Cooper came limping down to the beach and headed for the log, and Charley was waiting for him.

  That was the day Cooper gave Charley his case history. He had been an invalid, he said, from as far back as he could remember, although his mother had told him it hadn’t happened until he was three years old.

  He liked to listen to stories, and the stories that his parents and his brothers and sisters told him and read to him were what had kept him alive, he was certain, during those first years. For he made the stories work for him.

  He told how he made the characters—Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man and Little Bo Peep and all the rest of them—keep on working overtime after he had heard the stories. He would lie in bed, he said, and relive the stories over and over again.

  “But after a while, those stories got pretty threadbare. So I improved on them. I invented stories. I mixed up the characters. For some reason or other Peter Rabbit and the Gingerbread Man always were my heroes. They would go on the strangest odysseys and meet all these other characters, and together they would have adventures that were plain impossible.

  “Except,” he added, “they never seemed impossible to me.”

  Finally he had got to be the age where kids usually start off to school. Cooper’s Ma had begun to worry about what they should do for his education. But Doc Ames, who was fairly sure Cooper wouldn’t live long enough for an education to do him any good, had advised that they teach him whatever he might be interested in learning. It turned out that about all Cooper was interested in was reading. So they taught him how to read. Now he didn’t have to have anyone read him stories any more, but could read them for himself. He read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn and Lewis Carroll’s works and a lot of other books.

  So now he had more characters and Peter Rabbit had some rather horrible moments reconciling his world with the world of Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Mock Turtle. But he finally worked in, and the imagined adventuring got crazier and crazier.

  “It’s a wonder,” said Cooper Jackson, “that I didn’t die laughing. But to me it wasn’t funny. It was dead serious.”

  “What do you read now, Cooper?” Charley asked.

  “Oh, the newspapers,” Cooper said, “and the news magazines and stuff like that.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Charley explained. “What do you read for relaxation? What takes the place of Peter Rabbit?”

  Cooper hemmed and hawed a little and finally he admitted it.

  “I read science fiction. I ran onto it when someone brought me a magazine six or seven years ago … no, I guess it’s more like eight.”

  “I read the stuff myself,” said Charley, to put him at his ease.

  So they sat the rest of the afternoon and talked of science fiction.

  That night Charley Porter lay in his bed in the little lakeshore cabin, staring into the darkness, trying to understand how it must have been for Cooper Jackson, lying there all those years, living with the characters out of children’s books and later out of boys’ books and then out of science fiction.

  He had said that he’d never been in much pain, but sometimes the nights were long and it was hard to sleep, and that was how he’d got started with his imagining. He would imagine things to occupy his mind.

  At first, it was just a mental exercise, saying such and such a thing is happening now and going on from there to some other thing that was happening. But after a while he began to see an actual set of characters acting on an imaginary stage, faint and fuzzy characters going through their parts. They were nebulous at first; later on, they became gray, like little skipping ghosts; then they had achieved the sharpness of black and white. About the time he began to deal with Tom Sawyer and Robinson Crusoe, the characters and background had begun to take on color and perspective.

  And from Huck Finn and Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson, he had gone on to science fiction.

  Good Lord, thought Charley Porter. He went on to science fiction.

  Take an invalid who had never moved out of his bed, who had never had a formal education, who knew little and cared less about the human viewpoint, give him an overwrought imagination and turn him loose on science fiction—and what have you got?

  Charley lay there in the darkness and tried to put himself into the place of Cooper Jackson. He tried to imagine what Cooper might have imagined, what far adventuring he might have embarked upon.

  Then let the same invalid suddenly become aware of the world around him, as Cooper had—for now he read the newspapers and the news magazines. Let him see what kind of shape the world was in.

  What might happen then?

  You’re crazy, Charley told himself. But he lay for a long time, looking up into the black, before he went to sleep.

  Cooper seemed to like him, and they spent a part of each day together. They talked about science fiction and the news of the day and what should be done to ensure world peace. Charley told him he didn’t know what should be done, that a lot of men much smarter than he were working full time on it, and they had found no answer yet.

  “Someone,” said Cooper, “must do something about it.” And the way he said it, you would have sworn that he was going to set out any minute to do that very thing.

  So Charley went to call on old Doc Ames.

  “I’ve heard of you,” the doctor told him. “Coop was telling me about you just the other day.”

  “I’ve been spending a little time with Cooper,” Charley said, “and I’ve wanted to ask him something, but I haven’t done it.”

  “I know. You wanted to ask him about the story that was in the papers here a few months back.”

  “That’s right,” Charley agreed. “And I wanted to ask him, too, about how he got up and walked after all those years in bed.”

  “You’re looking for a story?” asked the doctor.

  “No,” said Charley, “I’m not looking for a story.”

  “You’re a newspaperman.”

  “I came for a story,” Charley told him. “But not any more. Right now I’m … well, I’m sort of scared.”

  “So am I.”

  “If what I’m thinking is right, it’s too big to be a story.”

  “I hope,” said Doc, “that both of us are wrong.”

  “He’s hell bent,” Charley went on, “to bring peace to the world. He’s asked me about it a dozen times in
a dozen different ways. I’ve told him I don’t know, and I don’t think there’s anyone who does.”

  “That’s the trouble. If he’d just stick to things like that lost plane out in Utah and the hound dog down in Kentucky, it might be all right.”

  “Did he tell you about those things, Doc?”

  “No,” said Doc, “he didn’t really tell me. But he said wouldn’t it be fine if all those people in the plane should be found alive, and he did a lot of fretting about that poor trapped dog. He likes animals.”

  “I figure he just practiced up on a few small items,” Charley suggested, “to find if he could do it. He’s out for big game now.”

  Then good, solid, common sense came back to him and he said: “But, of course, it isn’t possible.”

  “He’s got help,” said Doc. “Hasn’t he told you about the help he’s got?”

  Charley shook his head.

  “He doesn’t know you well enough. I’m the only one he knows well enough to tell a thing like that.”

  “He’s got help? You mean someone’s helping … ?”

  “Not someone,” said Doc. “Something.”

  Then Doc told Charley what Cooper had told him.

  It had started four or five years before, shortly after he’d gone on his science fiction binge. He’d built himself an imaginary ship that he took out into space. First he’d traveled around our own Solar System—to Mars and Venus and all the others. Then, tiring of such backyard stuff, he had built in a gadget that gave his ship speed in excess of light and had gone out to the stars. He was systematic about it; you had to say that much for him. He worked things out logically, and he didn’t skip around. He’d land on a certain planet and give that planet the full treatment before he went on to the next one.

  Somewhere along the way, he picked himself up a crew of companions, most of which were only faintly humanoid, if at all.

  And all the time this space-world, this star-world, got clearer and sharper and more real. It almost got to the point where he lived in its reality rather than in the reality of the here and now.

  The realization that someone else had joined him, that he had picked up from somewhere a collaborator in his fantasies, began first as a suspicion, finally solidified into certainty. The fantasies got into the habit of not going as he himself was imagining them; they were modified, and added to, and changed in other ways. Cooper didn’t mind though, for generally they were better than anything he could think up by himself—and finally he had grown to know his collaborators—not one of them alone, but three of them, each a separate entity. After the first shocks of recognition, the four of them got along just swell.

  “You mean he knows these others—these helpers?”

  “He knows them all right,” said Doc. “Which doesn’t mean, of course, that he has ever seen them or will ever see them.”

  “You believe this, Doc?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know Coop, and I know that he got up and walked. There is no medical science … no human medical science … that would have made him walk.”

  “You think these helpers, these collaborators of his, might somehow have cured him?”

  “Something did.”

  “One thing haunts me,” said Charley. “Is Cooper Jackson sane?”

  “Probably,” answered Doc, “he’s the sanest man on Earth.”

  “And the most dangerous.”

  “That’s what worries me. I watch him the best I can. I see him every day …”

  “How many others have you told?” asked Charley.

  “Not a soul,” said Doc.

  “How many are you going to tell?”

  “None. Probably I shouldn’t have told you, but you already knew part of it. What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going home,” said Charley. “I’m going to go home and keep my mouth shut.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing else. If I were a praying man, I think I’d do some praying.”

  He went home and kept his mouth shut and did a lot of worrying. He wondered whether, praying man or not, he should not try a prayer or two. But when he did, the prayers sounded strange and out of place coming from his lips, so he figured he’d better leave well enough alone.

  At times it still seemed impossible. At other times it seemed crystal clear that Cooper Jackson actually could will an event to happen—that by thinking so, he could make it so. But mostly, because he knew too much to think otherwise, Charley knew that the whole thing was true. Cooper Jackson had spent twenty years or so in thinking and imagining, his thoughts and imaginings shaped, not by the course of human events, but by the fantasy of many human minds. He would not think as a normal human being thought, and therein lay both an advantage and a danger.

  If he did not think in entirely human channels, he also was not trammeled by the limitations of human thinking; he was free to let his mind wander out in strange directions and bend its energies to strange tasks. His obsession with the necessity of achieving lasting peace was an example of his unhuman attitude; for, while the entire Earth did earnest lip service to the cause of peace, the threat of war had hung over every one so long that its horror had been dulled. But to Cooper Jackson, it was unthinkable that men should slay one another by the millions.

  Always Charley came back to those helpers, those three shadowy figures he pictured as standing at Cooper Jackson’s shoulder. He assigned them three arbitrary faces, but the faces would not stay as he imagined them. At last he understood that they were things to which you could assign no face.

  But the thing that he still worried most about, although he tried not to think of it at all because of its enormity, was the Utah plane crash.

  The plane had crashed before Cooper, or anyone else, could have known it was about to crash. Whatever had happened to the people in the plane had happened then, in that one split second when plane and peak had touched—had happened without benefit of the magic of Cooper Jackson’s wishful thinking. And to imagine that, without such benefit, the passengers and crew could have escaped unscathed was nothing short of madness. It just couldn’t have happened that way.

  And that meant that Cooper not only could make something turn out the way he wanted it to turn out, but that he also could go back through time and undo something that was already done! Either that, or he could bring dead people back to life, reassembling their shattered bodies and making them whole again, and that was even madder than to think that his wishful thinking might be retroactive.

  Whenever Charley thought about that, the sweat would start out on him and he’d think about Britain and Iran and once again he would see Cooper’s face, all puckered up with worry about what the world was coming to.

  He watched the news more closely than he had ever watched it, analyzing each unexpected turn in it, searching for the clue that might suggest some harebrained scheme to Cooper Jackson, trying to think the way Cooper might think, but feeling fairly sure that he wasn’t even coming close.

  He had his bags packed twice to go to Washington—but each time he unpacked them and put away his clothes and shoved the bags back into the closet.

  For he realized there was no use going to Washington, or anywhere else for that matter.

  “Mr. President, I know a man who can bring peace to the world …”

  They’d throw him out before he had the sentence finished.

  He called Doc Ames, and Doc told him that everything was all right, that Cooper had bought a lot of back-issue science fiction magazines and was going through them, cataloguing story themes and variant ideas. He seemed happy in this pastime and calmer than he’d been for weeks.

  When Charley hung up, he found that his hands were shaking and he suddenly was cold all over, for he felt positive that he knew what Cooper was doing with those piles of magazines.

  He sat in the one c
omfortable chair in his rented room and thought furiously, turning over and over the plots that he had run across in his science fiction reading. While there were some that might apply, he rejected them because they didn’t fit into the pattern of his fear.

  It wasn’t until then that he realized he’d been so busy worrying about Cooper that he hadn’t been paying attention to the recent magazines. Cold fear gripped him that there might be something in the current issues that might apply most neatly.

  He’d have to buy all the magazines he could find, and give them a good, fast check.

  But he got busy at one thing and another and it was almost a week before he got around to buying them. By that time his fear had subsided to some extent. Trudging home with the magazines clutched beneath his arm, he decided that he would put aside his worry for one night at least and read for enjoyment.

  That evening he settled himself in the comfortable chair and stacked the magazines beside him. He took the first one off the top of the stack and opened it, noting with some pleasure that the lead-off story was by a favorite author.

  It was a grim affair about an Earthman holding an outpost against terrific odds. He read the next one … about a starship that hit a space warp and got hurled into another universe.

  The third was about the Earth being threatened by a terrible war and how the hero solved the crisis by bringing about a condition which outlawed electricity, making it impossible in the Universe. Without electricity, planes couldn’t fly and tanks couldn’t move and guns couldn’t be sighted in, so there was no war.

  Charley sat in the chair like a stricken man. The magazine dropped from his fingers to the floor and he stared across the room at the opposite wall with terror in his eyes, knowing that Cooper Jackson would have read that story, too.

  After a while Charley got up and telephoned Doc.

  “I’m worried, Charley,” Doc told him. “Coop has disappeared.”

  “Disappeared!”

  “We’ve tried to keep it quiet. Didn’t want to stir up any fuss—the way Coop is and all. There might be too many questions.”